


Ghostline

by Sunderlorn



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: A journey through time and space sponsored by spectral possession, A parable on the dangers of accepting refreshment from handsome older men, A really weird dog, Ashlander, Awful things happening to perfect beautiful cinnamon rolls, Baths are hard combs are hard having hands is hard, Broken Crockery Crises, Discourse upon the Nordic tradition of seasonal recreational raiding: An outsider perspective, Dunmer - Freeform, Friendly Ghosts, Friendship: a wonderful way for everyone to end up gross-sobbing, Gen, Get in the fucking yurt Tammu, Gray Quarter, Guerilla Funerary Rites, Headwounds and getting stuck in holes, Lambing season, Making hair behave is powerful magic, No but seriously that is a really weird dog, No but seriously that is one weird dog, Non-binary protagonist, Numbers are powerful magic, On a mission from ghosts, Original Character(s), Singing is powerful magic but the easier kind, The infinite confusion of currency, There also is another mother about whom we do not speak - let me tell you about her, This my mum and this is my mum who's her sister and this is my mum who's her apprentice, Unconventional approaches to animal rescue, Windhelm, sad elves
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2018-03-10
Packaged: 2018-08-23 09:39:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 33
Words: 65,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8322961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunderlorn/pseuds/Sunderlorn
Summary: Tammunei Ereshkigal contains multitudes. Raised by three mothers and caring for a sickly fourth, Tammu has lived every day of their life in the shadow of what they will become: a wise-woman of the Ahemmusa; a listener and mouthpiece for the ghosts of their ancestors. Setting out now on a year-long self-imposed exile from home - a coming of age rite known to Ashlanders as the Harrowing - Tammunei remembers their life up to this point, and in turn, their ancestors share their memories through Tammunei.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Chronology is, in places, non-linear. Perspective is not singular. 'I' does not always mean Tammu. I apologise in advance.

_The wind has changed its tune. It rushes the same way, from west to east, through this pass. But it’s different on my lips; feels different on my skin. Our faces are bare and it chaffs against them. The wind here is a hedge to struggle through. It sings of Winter and its voice is bitter-cold. It aches in my ears and about my swollen eyes. I think:_

_This is what a border feels like. We’re crossing over. Here’s the rim. Beyond is only sky._

_My aunt speaks to me but doesn’t turn her head. “No tears, Tam. Give this place a taste for them and it’ll only want more in years yet to come.”_

_My name is Tammunei, but I have other names._

_I was Tammu in Blacklight to those who’d known my name for long enough to bite it shorter. Those I picked with at lowtide and fought with – over baubles of green glass worn smooth by the water – cribs of razor-clams with long wet beards – pieces of driftwood that looked like shalk or guar or familiar faces even before being carved._

_But my secret name is Tam. It’s what my mother calls me, and has ever since she first gave me my natural name. Now it’s the name used by those who know me better than well. Who know more than the sound of my laughter or cast of my face but also secret things — the scent of my unwashed hair – the colour of my blood – the wordless words I say in my sleep – the taste of my tears._

_It is the name my family calls me. My aunt and her half-daughter. And my half-sister and me. And the ghosts we have brought with us. Familiarity has let them shear it to the quick – one sound only – Tam._

_I have seen eleven Summers. I have seen two lands. This one that is ahead of me – that I have already let taste my tears, stupid Tam – will be the third. And by the sound of the wind, and its feel on my face, I think:_

_I won’t see another Summer until I leave this place. It’s always Winter here._

 

Summer in Skyrim is always short and brittle. Shot through with hairline cracks, it breaks on occasion for days at a time — forgetting itself, it turns a kind of cold that only seems colder, because the sky is still blue and the sun is still bright but unsmiling. Then comes a warm night, or a breeze that smells like turned earth or new-grown grass, or the noise of gulls before dawn, and Summer remembers itself again.

But rhythms are strong things. The tides are a rhythm, as much as a heartbeat. The phasing moons dance to one. The seasons turn to one. You can’t stand against a strong rhythm — it’s like swimming against a river’s flow, or trying not to breathe. That’s what Tanet taught me.

So eventually there’ll always come a crack of cold like that in Summer, to settle over the land, then get into its bones. The nights get darker and longer. They gnaw at the edges of morning and evening till they’re good as gone — no more liminal time left in the day. Then the rains come. And on their trailing skirts, Autumn creeps in.

The Maze of Veils is hung in Delver’s Nook. In Blacklight we strung together spider-silks and fishing-nets, and real sheets of gauze. But here we don’t have the same luxuries we might have had once — not a one among us does. In the Grey Quarter we make do. Our Maze is cobbled together from drapes and dust-sheets and ash-stained hearthrugs, and we only hope the One of the Three we made it for won’t mind.

Today is the Spinner’s Summoning Day, among other things. Mostly it’s a day of rain.

There’s no sun in the sky to be seen, for it’s hidden behind a curtain of off-white cloud. Even so, the slabs that pave the Stone Quarter shine like polished pewter. I track mud across them — the streets and alleys I’ve come from are only paved with packed dirt, and the rain has turned nearly the whole Grey Quarter into a swamp more than a slum.

I pull my useless shawl round and over my head, but the rain’s already in all my clothes. It’s boggy-warm from being close to my body, like being swaddled in bathwater. I walk more carefully than usual — the slabs are slick and there are pools of rippling water to fall into where the stones are pockmarked or potholed.

My hair’s soaked to my scalp. Good, I think. It’s not so bright when it’s wet or damp. I’m up walking Nord-side of the city, where being mer is bad enough, and being Velothi is worse — but being both of those and memorable is worst of all. My hair is memorable.

I slip round a corner and into a square. All about the buildings are tall and old and built from blocks of basalt. They show their age by their smoothness, each saying but not quite saying how many rainy Autumns like this they’ve seen, to wash the roughness from them. This is the oldest city on the continent, so the Nords say, and it’s easy to believe their lies when the buildings back them up like this. But they’re lies nonetheless to those that know the truth: it might be the oldest city of men and nothing more.

A low dry-stone wall borders off a patch of common ground in the square’s center. The gate is wrought from iron, blackened so as not to rust with time. I give silent thanks to the rain for greasing its hinges. There’s no noise as I enter. Just grass, soft and waterlogged, and a spindly bay tree in the middle with arms upreached. Its lower branches are a mix of bare sprigs where the leaves have been plucked for the cook-pot, and new shoots where they’ve grown back.

What I’m looking for grows at the edges. Through the whole other half of the year, even I wouldn’t be able to tell the right shrubs from the wrong – dogrose maybe, or tanavian – but with the rains and the cold has come snowberry season. The stems are budding or else already ripe with fruit. For a moment I forget the rain.

I reach into a slit up the long skirt of my work-smock, and unhitch the wax-lined bag I have from where it’s been hidden, strapped to my thigh. My fingers are cold and clumsy, but I work quick as I can to pluck off the ripest fruit and slip them into the pouch, almost full now.

It goes back under my smock after that. These gardens are public, but not public to me or mine. I’m afraid of what the Nords would do if they found me. What I call foraging, they’d call theft. I hurry off through the rain, back to where I’ve come from; across the pewter pavements, back down into the deep shadowed damp.

 

_I am barely born. Summer is high and hot. It shimmers in the air, like something woven all through the distance. My mother stands at the mouth of a long wide cleft through the mountains, and looks east through the thick haze the heat has made._

_Towers of dust move across the land ahead. They sail the wastes by whirling, like dancers can move by whirling. These dancers made from dust shift across the wastes. They were not always wastes, but my mother does not remember them any other way. She never left the coastline she called home until my aunt told her:_

_“The sky will turn to fire. The air will turn to ash. These waters will boil and go bad. I’ve seen it now, but not early enough…”_

_And my mother said: “Perhaps there’s still time.”_

_I can’t see the wastes that once were highlands. I can’t see that they’re the colours of unfired clay. I can’t see that the sky is white and gold like broken eggs. I am wrapped tight and cradled. I am pinned to my mother’s chest. I am a small and sickly child, born too early. She thinks:_

_One breath of dust would choke him. One look at this place would break his heart, and what then? It would never grow right._

_She had me partway through the pass. She birthed me drowned and awful onto what was once a good cloak. I was a sack of bones, and a few curls of crimson matted to a skull. She is pleased to see I have my grandfather’s hair._

_I am barely born. These are not my rememberings. I know them in my bones._

 

The Morayat is crowded and cramped. Even when no-one walks the paths between the tents and their moorings, the wind sends ripples through the leather and waxed kresh-weave, and the pennants hung from our yurt-stays. So the place seems always alive. Like a breeze goes bristling through a forest. This is how the Morayat got its name: tent-forest; wood without trees.

Really it’s not large enough to deserve the name — more like a copse than a forest. It’s the plot given over to us in the Quarter who keep the old ways, each after our own fashion, and there are not many of us. Some in the Quarter were of the Clans before they came here, but once they reached Windhelm they dug themselves into the rock of the old quarry-gorge, just the same as the House Velothi. We few still live like those that came before us, under canopies that see the moons and stars each night. But we pitch not on the plains, or the wastes, or on the coast, but in the Morayat — here at the bottom of the steps that lead dockside, just before the river-gate.

Now the Morayat’s paths are busy for the night we give over to the Spinner’s use. The ground here slopes gently at each side. This space before the big river-gate was a dry-dock once, before it was given to us Clansmer. Mostly it goes inward and downward, shaped like a vaulted roof turned the wrong way up. Only the very bottom is flat, in a long narow channel toward the gate, and that’s the Morayat’s main causeway. Tonight it is thronged, even in the rain, and I throng through it, though the crowds make my heart feel pressed and bloodless-pale.

A mer sells oysters to passers-by. Another has a wide karahi set over a brazier. The creaking noise and floury-sweet scent of cooking chestnuts rise up from it. She is not shouting, but still the paths are livid with voices. There are more lanterns than usual overhead. Someone plays an ocarina and their song keeps a swarm of torchbugs circling above us.

I duck off the causeway and down a thin vein of path. Paths in the Morayat are like that — like a river when it spreads into delta; one channel and a thousand small streams.

Soon I stand before our yurt. I dip my fingers into the shalk-shell bowl by the doorway, filled with rainwater. I anoint my forehead, my wrists, the middle of my chest. I struggle to balance as I pull off my footwraps, then duck under the door-flap.

“Blessings on you,” I say.

I move into the customary rhythm of greetings like a habit old as walking. My aunt Nanrahamma is already home, sat cross-legged by our hearth with her pipe steadily fuming and the render-pot ready.

“And on you and yours,” she says. “What news of the world you’ve been walking?”

“Outside is an oyster-seller. He’s shucking them for those who’ll buy, and shouting in a voice like gravel when there’s no one who will.”

“And what does he say when he’s shouting?”

“‘Oysters! Oysters just out the river! — No sera, they’re not relk, but then again this ain’t home neither!’”

Nanrahamma’s face creases into the puzzle of lines I know to be her smile. Her laugh is like wet wood on a fire.

“What news from the hearth you’ve been tending?” I ask, still moving through the formalities.

“Only that it’s warm, and you’re not,” she cuts the ritual short. That’s the prerogative of age and wisdom. “Sit, sit! Before the wet and cold make a newt of you.”

I sit. The fumes from the render-pot are strong but familiar to me: Nanrahamma’s wood-alcohol. It’s not fit for drinking, but we use it to steep alchemies, to make extracts and strengthenings. I empty my pouch of snowberries into the pot. They steam, and the smell in the steam is tart and cool.


	2. Chapter 2

The spell I know requires a handful of ash and a song to be sung, to ease the spirit out of itself, and into everything else that is. My fire has turned to embers and cinders, hoarded up and shrinking in the black iron brazier I toppled off its pedestal and into the chamber’s middle. There’s ash to be had if ash was needed. But the spell I know is for Velothi dead. I don’t know just what the Nords do to honour theirs.

I crouch on my haunches by the body. The chamber is cold around us. The fire now is hardly hotter than blushing, its warmth trapped between these five walls, and the low dark ceiling. The floor is cracked with roots and sprouts of pale plants that need only a little light. A chill night waits outside, carrying on, but it hasn’t forgotten me — there’s a gap or a break somewhere in this chamber, and the wind moans through it in cold breath, after cold breath, after cold breathing sigh.

The dead man lies near to the chamber’s middle. He knotted in on himself before he died, like a spider’s legs buckling inward, or an infant still waiting to be born. It wasn’t the cold that did it, for my guess is that he died while Summer still had plenty of wick left to burn through. His gritted teeth and clawing hands, and curled up begging body, and the silver-white film near the edge of his mouth that might have been foam or vomit or slavering thirst — they tell me poison’s what got him.

I am careful around this chamber.

 

_“Now, little spark. Tell me back what I’ve just taught you.”_

_Nanrahamma teaches me – Tanet teaches me – sometimes Noor teaches me, though there are times she learns alongside me. Nanrahamma teaches me mostly by rote. She speaks like she is telling a story, and then I tell it back. She calls me ‘little spark’ when I’m being good. Being good, I tell her:_

_“First brew down the hackle-lo_  
_To a dram of bitter tea;_  
_Then mix in powdered alit hide_  
_Till a paste is made just so._  
_Wise then is the womer who_  
_Adds always this third part;_  
_Take care with sap of chokeweed_  
_For it cures but poisons too.”_

_She smiles mostly with her eyes. They are the colour of blood spilt in milk._

_I’m still a child but old enough to know the rhymes she teaches me are silly. I’ve heard the songs and stories the elder clansmer sing and speak round our driftwood fires here in the Tide District. I don’t understand all the words, or all the knots each tale unties in its telling. But I know they’re what real poetry is. Nanrahamma’s rhymes are only rhymes, but they’re important too — what they tell is important, and so is what they leave out. I carry on, not rhyming anymore:_

_“And don’t forget the honey. A small-spoon of it. Or merrow molasses if you can’t get it.”_

_“Ah yes,” she says. “The honey.”_

_“Why isn’t it in the rhyme, Auntie? Because there’s no boon in the honey? And that’s why you can change it for molasses?”_

_“N’chow. Trying to be too clever only gets you half-right sometimes, little spark. The honey’s not in the rhyme because I couldn’t find anything to make the right music with it — clumsy Westerner’s word, ‘honey’. But don’t think it’s got no boon to it. It makes the medicine easier on your mother, and that’s a powerful thing too.”_

_My mother is sleeping._

_She sleeps more than she does anything else now. In the sleeping-heap with its piled up soft-hides, and rag-work blankets – in the woven chair that is one of the only good things my aunt owns – in the fish-net hammock that rocks her into murmuring dreams to the rhythm of the water under us._

_Now she is in the sleeping-heap. Her pale hair is flat and wet on her brow and flush against her temples. Her hand is balled into a fist. She sweats. Her teeth are bared. I know she is dreaming, so I know she won’t hear what I say:_

_“But it still won’t make her better, will it?”_

_“Make her whole again you mean? Nothing will. Not anymore. Not the way she was when she got here, with how long it had been.”_

_Nanrahamma’s voice is gentle. When her voice is gentle I get scared and find it harder to speak._

_I choke on my next words, but she knows what I am trying to ask. “So there’s nothing we can do for…”_

_“The poison? It’s slow already. We can only make it slower. Oh, little spark. Little spark, don’t look like that. Now you can — now you can too. You’ve got wisdom brewing in you. You’re helping.”_

_She says I am helping. All I think I am is crying again._

 

Corpses do not disgust or scare me.

In Blacklight they were the main part of Tanet’s work. She took them in from their families once their first span of grieving was done, and gave the dead their rites to weave them into the right ghostline — all for a couple of yera. She would wake the dead on the threshold of our yurt, and put their bodies to dust and resting bones. Even before I was old enough or knew enough to help, I’d seen the face of death a a dozen times or more.

This one’s been left longer than I’m used to. Summer set to work on him, forgotten down here, in this chamber under the ground. It took his eyes from under their lids. Then the cold came and shrivelled him. Don’t the Nords embalm their dead? For that’s what Winter has done to him. The skin is shrunken and tight on his bones — it will turn to dust before it starts to rot.

I don’t know what might be behind the sealed black iron doors of this chamber. I only came looking for shelter from the rain and the cold. I crouched and clambered through a crack of tunnel with water running slick along its bottom, with my overskirt hitched up and away from my scuffling feet.

I found him here. His ghost is long gone, but while the body lies here I cannot sleep or rest. I tell myself I am not disgusted by it; I am not scared of it. But I feel a furrow on my brow. I can’t give him what his people demand for the dead. But I can save him from plundering foxes in Winter, and flesh-flies in Summer.

I pour a little water from my travel-skin onto my hands to wash them. I lick the pad of my thumb, and then do the same for my first two fingers. A hum begins in my throat, singing the song that Tanet taught me when I was still a child. I reach towards the fire and take up a pinch of the cold white ash from its edges.

With my thumb I draw on my brow the sign that marks me as a singer for the spirits. I inch my hand towards the body. I hesitate only a little – I am not afraid; I am not disgusted; I am sacred while I sing; I tell myself these things – and I mark his sallow forehead. The skin is like parchment or wax.

My song rises. I can hear the magic in the air and its pitch and timbre is like my singing, letting me know I’ve remembered the song just right. Before my eyes the body crumbles. It’s like he is burning but without flames. It takes a matter of minutes for the flesh to melt away. He is dust now, swept into dancing by the wind that moans into this place.

My song finishes and my work is done. The rest is between him and his ancestors. Of the corpse some bones remain, but nothing else — I half expect to find a string of bronze yera among the ashes.

The cold is deepening. Night’s come outside and has reached its darkest part. I can smell rain through the gaps in this chamber — it steals in and out with the wind. Sometimes I hear thunder. But I lie down, curled like the corpse was, next to what’s left of my fire. I try to sleep as I try to stay warm.

My hair is already knots and tangles. It will be worse come morning. And come morning I will still be alone — not even a corpse for company.

 

_The comb is smooth through my hair — like a sleek swimmer through calm waters. It catches only very rarely, tugging at the knots the day has tied in my hair. When the comb catches to untangle me, I hiss sharply at the hurt. My mother chides me:_

_“You’ll have to learn to do it yourself one day.” Her voice is rougher than even Nanrahamma’s, as if she’s been shouting all her life and has only now found cause to be quiet._

_“I can do it myself,” I say. “It’s just you’re so much better at making it not-hurt.”_

_I am old enough now to know pride, but young enough to still long for this — the carved chitin comb in my matted hair – my mother’s steady fingers on the spine of the comb – my mother’s voice to guide my hand in place of hers, to grip the long locks partway down their length, so as not to let their roots pull and hurt. Young enough that my mother is still here. Even so, I look around sometimes to make sure I can see her — like I call out sometimes when she is in the yurt but out of sight, to make sure she’s still in earshot. I am a child. Everything scares me. The only thing that scares me more is the fear that everything will leave me behind._

_“There’s a lot you’ll have to learn to do on your own,” she continues. “That’s our way, Tam. Stronger together, strong still when alone.” She says those words like they belong to someone else — like they have been passed down to her and now to me. “That’s the way with all clansmer. We all have to prove we can follow it one day, or else we’re no clansmer at all.”_

_She can feel that I am nervous. It is a stiffness in my shoulders and a shaking in my hands. I like to be on my own but do not like to be left alone. Everything scares me._

_But her hand is still steady as she says to me: “It won’t be tomorrow. There, Tam. It won’t be tomorrow, nor even the next day.” Her voice grows firmer, like muscle tensing to grip. “Isn’t that enough? It comes for us all eventually, d’you hear? The Harrowing comes. Ashes and bones, if I can’t make you ready…If I can’t teach you strength…”_

_The comb catches and pulls. I do not hiss this time. I cry out._


	3. Chapter 3

I wake up truly alone. The panic lasts only a moment while I come to my senses, and then there’s only the chamber, and my cold-stiffened limbs. The wind still moans through the cracks in this place, but now daylight finds its way in too. It throws shapes on the floor. A flexed arm; a bushy-tailed cat; and other kinds of nothing, formless as clouds. I view them through bleary eyes. My lids are sandy with sleep, and I rub at them with my knuckles.

I am alone. That is what it means to be Harrowed, though there are other names for it amongst the clansmer. The Pilgrim Year; Nemalaruhn, or The Trial of Not Coming Home; The Walk of One. But being Ahemmusa, my mother – and Nanrahamma and Noor – always called it The Harrowing.

There are two rites every clansmer undergoes, under watch of their ancestors, to become who they are.

The first is the Naming, and lasts only one day. It’s the rite that gives us our forename, and writes it into the Ghostline of our families. It’s how the voices of our ancestors know to find us, and it’s the day from which we count our ages.

A Naming is cause for celebration. In Blacklight it meant the hiss and pop of bull-crabs roasted in their shells, and lines of fish smoked slow or grilled hard over fires — it meant all the Tide District awash with song and sujamma. In the Morayat, a Naming means discounted goods, the telling of stories and remembering of what’s been lost. For those that can dance, it means dancing.

But the beginning of a Harrowing is a day for a silent struggle between dread and hope. The mer being Harrowed hopes to return. Their family tries their worst to miss them enough that day, so they will fret and worry less while they are gone — like letting blood to cure an illness of excess. The Harrowed leaves their home, and may not return while the rite lasts: a full year, walking the world, under the eyes of our ancestors; so they might find us worthy, and we might know ourselves.

Here and now, those reaching bars of daylight mark the fourth day of my Harrowing. But it began long before I left. We harvested snowberries, gleaned and sold their extract, so I would have the money to buy what I’d need.

 

_The boots are right._

_Most things here are blunted or hardened with age, and with the others that have worn them and used them. Revyn Sadri sells things which have already known at least one owner. A dented shield – a cloak that’s been torn and darned, torn and darned again – a copper tea-kettle, with almost all the old fingerprints buffed away – a set of redware cups, broken and fixed with shalk resin, so now they are veined with fault-lines the colour of ink._

_But these boots — age has softened them. I see them and know their fit is right. They rise to just below the knee, and fasten without ties. Instead they are corded all about the shin, to fasten round buttons and make the fit tight. They are the colour of honey, and slim about the ankle…_

_“I see you’ve spotted the smoke-hides.” Sadri is leaning over his counter towards me, where before there was only empty space. “And why shouldn’t you? Fine work, fine materials — it’s good goatskin, wet-scraped and smoked for durability and, of course, for that colour…”_

_“I think,” I say carefully, “I think I’d like to buy them.”_

_I step back from the counter and cross my arms about my body, not meeting Sadri’s eye. I rub the wool of my work-smock between finger and thumb. The texture calms me. I want to touch the boots too, but know I shouldn’t touch anything I haven’t yet bought._

_“And why shouldn’t you?” he asks, smiling. His smile is too wide. “Why not indeed! They’re yours for a shilling and three.”_

_I nod. I reach into the slit at the side of my smock and find my purse, pocketed into the lining. Stepping towards the counter again, I empty the purse onto it. Out spills a mess of copper coins. I hope Sadri will take his price and I will not have to count for him._

_But he frowns for a moment. His eyebrows flutter upwards in surprise. Then he begins to slide coppers out from the pile and into another smaller mess, till he has an amount that seems to please him. Relief rushes to fill me — I am a sail that has found the breeze again._

_“Is that enough?” I ask him._

_“It will do, sera. It will do.” His smile is not so shark-like now. It is warm but lax._

_“Gah-julan! Blessings on you and yours, muthsera.” The relief sounds high in my voice. I sweep, then sweep, then sweep with the flat edge of my palm, till all the remaining coins are back in my purse, and my purse is back in its pocket. I am smiling too, but I don’t smile with my teeth — I have ripe lips; my natural smile draws them thin. “Can I take them?”_

_Sadri nods. “They’ll carry you well if you treat them well, Ashlander.”_

_Is it by my braids he can tell what I am? Or is there something in my accent or my cast? I am not yet marked, as some older clansmer are — it cannot be the scars I have not yet earnt._

_I take the boots, touching them for the first time. The hide is napped and soft, and I’m glad to think they’re mine. But as I leave I can’t help feel something, like Sadri’s pity at my back._

 

I leave the chamber, crawling through the same gullet of tunnel that gained me entrance yesterday. It spits me out into the morning.

Frost settled while I was sleeping, and it glistens in hoary patterns on the stones round me. Ancient time-worn things, shaped like the heads of animals, carved from basalt by the hands of long-dead men. They jut from the riverbank and gesture towards the tunnelmouth. They cast strange shadows, and I pass under them, blinking against the light, walking to the water.

The mud of the bank is frozen half-hard but the water though cold is still flowing. This is the White River. Today its depths look dark. Overhead the sky is nearly white, and hills rise on the wide river’s far side. Dark as it is, the water-face looks smooth as a black mirror — no waves, no ripples, no motion at all.

I’ve spent the last six years by the shores of this river. I know the way it lulls and falls still round Windhelm, and I know the way it rushes the rest of its length. I know that it flows past the city and empties itself into the Sea of Ghosts: the sea I’ve known almost all the rest of my life, before I ever saw Skyrim. So I know it well enough. I know the noise it makes in the night, lapping against the docks, as loud and near as if it was rain on my roof. The noise is important.

I don’t have a map to guide me. Instead I have a way memorised, walking the way we came to Windhelm, but in reverse this time. We came along the river, so that however cold we were, we would never get lost and would never go hungry.

I chew a hunk of tough blackbread, and walk beside the river, following its flow.

 

_The river is frozen. A sheen of ice spreads bright over it, from the piers and shares and jetties of the docks, out to the far shore. It creaks thinly, as if a breath of wind could crack it. This is another sign of Autumn. The lull in the river by Windhelm is always earliest to grow a skin of ice._

_“Nothing to be scared of, Tam,” says Tanet. “Nothing you haven’t done before.”_

_“Mm,” Nanrahamma murmurs, and her voice creaks like the ice. “For a clumsy little thing you were always good at this.”_

_“Nan!” Tanet chides, kissing her teeth._

_We are gathered on a spar of wooden stilts and wooden boards — the one that reaches farthest from the dockside._

_Tanet with her thick dark hair, streaked these days with grey – her tall and narrow silhouette – the hard set of her mouth – the cross of her arms, almost always wrapped round her. She would look like she disapproved of the whole world if I didn’t know her better._

_Nanrahamma, shorter and broad – hair white as snow – eyes like blood dropped into ewes’ milk – her whole body wrapped round with scarves, strings of beads, belts of chitin disks, rattling necklaces of bone and brass._

_I stand steps ahead of them. In my work-smock – my scarf – my overskirt – my new-old boots that feel soft and fit well – my trousers tucked into them. With my sling-sack over my shoulders – my use-knife against my thigh – my thick wild hair newly combed and partly plaited._

_Others wait further back._

_We Velothi of the Quarter have been crossing the ice for years — years before I came here, or even was born, I think. The Nords begrudged our coming to the city so much, we agree it’s strange how hard they make it to leave. So we cross the ice, Autumn through Winter, bypassing the city’s gate and ending up on the river’s far bank._

_Even so, a crossing this early in the season is an event. A small crowd of Velothi bristles on the docks. Some pretend not to look, and others make no attempt to lie — they have come to see me cross, or they have come to see me slip._

_“Whenever you’re ready, Tam,” Tanet says to me, and rests a hand under my shoulder. I shrug a little against the weight but do not shrug away._

_“You’d best ask them to watch over me,” I say. My voice is thin and drawn but does not hitch. To those on the docks, maybe I seem brave. I pull from Tanet’s touch and walk towards the extent of the jetty. “All of them,” I continue. “Every ghost that’ll call me kin, d’you hear? Hope for me.”_

_I step onto the ice. It whines under my new-old boots. Nanrahamma begins the rite, chanting:_

_“In the eyes of every voice that speaks to us in the wind. Under the gaze of the always-open sky. Turn your sights on our blood, kin that have come before — sent out to know no company but you, to better know itself.”_

_I begin to walk with flat shuffling feet and my weight crouched low above the ice. This is the way. I’ve done it before._

_“Watch our blood as it walks the world and see how your blood too is blended there.” Nanrahamma chants on. Her voice grows more distant with every step I take. “Return, kin of our blood, when the time for returning comes. Kin that have come before, find them safe and name them worthy.”_

_The ice heaves but does not break. The crowd bays distant on the docks. This is what it is to be Harrowed. These are the first steps of my long journey._


	4. Chapter 4

I’ve kept the river always to my left, but now the world on the right is changing. A road meanders in close to the bank as I knew it would. It’s dirt mostly, but sunk with stones here and there to partway pave it. On one side it crops up, on the other it cuts down into a waste-ditch. Longer than just this curve in its path might say, I know this road and where it leads: beyond Skyrim’s borders, through that cold pass…

I walked for days downstream to reach it. Each night snow tried to whisper down from the dark above, and each morning it failed to settle. I found shelter to sleep through the cold when I could, and slept in the damp and the chill when I couldn’t.

I am prepared in a hundred small ways. I have a waxed sleeping-skin, with a short burr of pelt on its inside to wrap myself in. I know the waters here — how to step knee-deep into their flow, and call up fish into my cupped waiting hands, singing spells to them from deep in my throat. I haven’t gone sleepless; I have not starved.

The waste-ditch is muddy and brackish. Snow heaped up in it by night, and even melted into standing-water it speaks a warning of what’s to come. Autumn in Skyrim is always a kind of prelude.

The wind is picking up. It plays my hair into my eyes. One red lock spools into the corner of my mouth and won’t come unstuck. I frown and wrinkle my nose, peering down into the ditch to judge the distance from this side to the other, where the edge of the road coasts by. My skin feels wrong on my face — thick as paint, as it always feels after days of not bathing. I hitch up my skirts and hop over the ditch, onto the road.

 

_“Then you’re not listening hard enough.”_

_Nanrahamma’s words come out as smoke. In her left hand she cups the bowl of her pipe. Its long stem leads up to her mouth. Fumes pour out of her flaring nostrils even when her mouth is closed and her voice is silent. She is not done speaking._

_“…Or should I have known better – hm? – than to’ve set a boy-born child on the path I have?”_

_“They’re not here,” I say. She has pricked my temper and it rises up in me like steam to heat my thoughts and words. “You said so yourself. They’re buried mostly, somewhere in a cave by the sea, maybe six days’ sail away. How’m I meant to listen that far?”_

_Pain blossoms out over my left hand. It becomes specific after a moment — arcing out from my knuckles, then aching dully in the vulnerable bone. Another moment passes and I know Nanrahamma has hit me, with the hard bone-carved bowl of her pipe, over the tender bones of my knuckles._

_“You don’t have to,” she snaps. “They’re here. In the fire – the smoke – the air. In your bones even, ever since I wove you into our line. So listen hard and listen right.”_

_I try to listen. I can hear the pain still humming out from my hand. It rings like a deep-tolling bell. I can hear the waves fretting against the sides of our home-raft. I can hear the hiss of our driftwood fire – I gathered its fuel this morning – I think I can picture every piece, even as the flames chew them up. I can hear Nanrahamma’s rasping breath, and Tanet talking to her quiet and quick:_

_“…You’re forgetting. Remember how I came to you, Nan? Remember the last little spark of a boy-born child you took on? You taught her how to listen, Nan. You gave me the wisdom to speak. But it didn’t happen in a day…”_

_I hear the kresh-weave ropes that moor us all together – all of us in the Tide District – and the jetties and wave-breaks that anchor us all to landside Blacklight. I hear the ropes and wood expand under the beat of the sun. I hear my blood in constant motion. I hear paddles in the water and coast-racers in the sky. I hear Nanrahamma’s sigh._

_“You’re right. He’s quicker than you were.”_

_And then I hear. It comes over me now. Like sitting in shade and finding the shade has moved and suddenly the sun is on you. It’s not a sound of its own but it’s in everything I hear and behind it all, but changing every sound like a musician can play feelings from notes that mean nothing on their own. In the fire I hear strains from a piece of sea I’ve never seen. In my pulsing blood and silent bones I can hear something hard to explain._

_There’s no distance to listen across. It’s all here. The Ghostline — all my waiting ancestors, ready to speak when I’m ready to listen. Like the breath behind every word the world says._

 

I was only nine when I first opened the Waiting Door. Most must find one, in the shrines and crypts of those that came before. But it’s a farseer’s place to be a door themselves, and always carry the Waiting with them, always listening, in case those that came before have something important to say.

I’m not a farseer like Nanrahamma or Tanet, but I know how to listen. Sometimes I can’t stop myself, no less than a bowl left out in a storm can help getting filled up with rainwater — sometimes I find myself so full of hearing I think I will go deaf.

Now I can feel it trickling in. It’s a thickness in the air, like it’s full of things waiting to be heard. I walk along the road and it only grows thicker till it’s on my skin, laid over the unwashed feeling that lacquers me. This is the road from Morrowind to Skyrim. No wonder, after all the years that’ve passed since the first refugees came this way, that ghosts grow here like weeds.

But they’re broken into bits by time and lack of tending. A taste of tears on the breeze; an echo that makes my muffled footsteps sound like the slow marching of many; a weariness I can feel outside me, in the air rather than in my bones — all these are things they’ve left behind.

I travel on. They become a kind of noise — not a sound in themselves, but a hum at the heart of everything I can hear. There might be voices too, but this place misremembers them just as much as they refuse to be forgotten. Their stalemate is a grinding thing only I can hear.

I grit my teeth and rub the fabric of my smock between my fingers.

I am walking uphill when I see it, cresting over the edge of the rise. It’s a squat ruin that might have been a tower once. Like a lighthouse inland for travellers on the road, it’d tell them where they’re at: you’re coming into Skyrim proper, traveller, you’d do well to remember it.

I’ve seen it before and I know it from my own memories — even then it had become something else. Even the House Velothi of Skyrim make pilgrimage to this place. Bittersweet and complicated, it has whole shoals of names. But mostly we call it Refugee’s Rest.

It throws a short shadow with the sun high and small overhead, but coming towards it I still feel that I’m walking in its shade. I can see the worn stones of the tower, and the heaped up drystone cairns rebuilt from its ruin after it started falling down. Pennants beat against the wind and stream stripes of colour into the white sky.

The hum is loud and presses like deep water.

I’m a pilgrim twice over now, coming here for the second time. I’ve aged by six full years but this place remains the same. I stand in its shadow and look in through the gaping breach in the tower’s roadside flank.

Every wall inside is feathered: scraps of parchment, scraps of hide; scraps of ragged cloth, pinned or tied into the stone. Written on them are the names of the lost and the found. I step inside. I want to read them — the wanting almost chokes me.

“Was wonderin’ when one of you’d turn up.” The voice is coarse from the dark inside. There are unlit lamps, jars of dead torchbugs, candles that’ve all burnt down. “Been waiting.”

My skin is crawling. I can’t talk back. My mouth hangs open and my throat seals shut.

“Well?” he asks. “Nothing? An elf and a mute. They’re cruel gods you’ve got, makin’ you that way.”

He steps from the dark. He’s tall, broad, dressed in a shearling coat. Human but I can’t tell what kind. I try not to look at his face, but I see he has something in his hands. Now I can’t stop looking at that instead. A club, long and made from knotted wood, with a heavy smooth knot at the end. He strokes it with his rough hands.

I am choking and my eyes are wide.

“Well?” he says again. “What you brought for your cruel gods then, elf? I seen your type come before and you always come with offerings. So what’ll it be? You gonna offer ‘em to me, or am I gonna have to find something to take instead?”

I cannot make a sound. Like in a nightmare, I can’t scream. He’s made me mute. But the hum is growing round us. It bristles in every inch of tight silence. It’s loud in my ears and growing till I can’t hear. I look at his face and see his mouth moving but I’m deaf to the words.

I back up against one fluttering wall. My hand shakes as I move it into my smock, reaching for my thigh and my use-knife.

He shouts more silence at me. I feel it spray against my face. The club rises and falls.

I hurt after that. My eyes can only see silence. I have fallen and my face is washed wet with heat and I am trying to open my eyes.

He grabs a fistful of my hair and yanks me up and I am trying to open my eyes but one will not open. With one good eye I see his seething face. I’m thrown and I hit the wall again.

The hum is a ringing that tolls in my broken-yolked head. The hum is an ache in my gut like what’s left when laughter’s laughed itself empty. Still it’s boiling up and it’s in my throat. It gathers round him. It starts all over his skin like frost. I see dimly but I still see his fingers turn from white to grey to black. His face is not shouting but screaming now as he collapses to the ground.

“See?” I hiss. I am scrambling to my feet but crouched like a creature and spitting every word. “See how cruel my gods are?”

Things like wisps of smoke coil round him. They are vengeful. They’re not my kin but they are my kind and won’t stand to see me hurt. Not here. They still his hands with cold as I watch through eyes that only half understand. The ghosts of this place strangle the life from him. Like weeds.


	5. Chapter 5

There’s a throbbing ache nestled under one of my shoulderblades. That’s where I hit the wall. Where he struck me with the cudgel, my left eye is bruising closed. The split he left in my brow has stopped bleeding, but the sting of it carries on, and my blood has turned stiff like sap from the body of a tree.

My scalp hurts too but least of all. I barely notice it in amongst the others, as the panic fades and my body gets down to the business of cataloguing itself. With the ebbing panic comes pain. With the ebbing panic comes sickness. I cower against the wall. Dry-retching, I worry I’ll soil this place if I can’t hold down the bile. After that I cower in the dust and dark of the tower. I whimper like a whipped guar.

It lasts I don’t know how long. Until nightfall at least. And even after, my hands are shaking and my knees unsteady. Seeing the world through one eye, everything seems shallow and only half-real.

I get to my feet. For the second time lately, I’m alone with a corpse, but I’ve got no soft cold pity for this one. Instead it scares me till the fear is almost like anger. Its face is tattooed and its hands are almost gone. Its lips are thin and blue with cold.

I grab it by the collar of its coat and heave to drag it out of the tower, into the gathering night. I leave the body open to the sky. I hope foxes dig it open and crows swallow down what’s left.

Back inside, I remember where I am and what I owe. I whisper the last wick and wax of a candle into life again, though I have never been good at Fire-Calling, and now the effort of pushing the spell through the pain makes my head spin. I set my sling-sack on the ground and fish inside it till I find a length of tar-soaked match and start it from the guttering candle. From that little spark I light every lamp and candle that’ll still hold a flame.

“Thanks be to you that came before,” I murmur, moving stiffly between the lamps. “Thanks be to you who shared not my blood but proved yourselves my ancestors in defending me against one who’d spill it. Thanks be to you who shelter me on my Harrowing. Thanks be to you who came to this place from a home that sent us from itself. I give you my name so that you might know me, and though I have little else, what I have is yours…”

I have reached into my sling-sack again and brought out a few crescents of dried apple, a pinch of salt, a crust of travel-bread. I place them on what passes for an altar here: a three-sided flat-topped stone, gathered from the fallen walls and set about now with glimmering lights. I try not to let my hosts see that I’m shy and disappointed of the offering in case they get disappointed too.

“I am Tammunei Ereshkigal,” I say to this place and its ghosts, “born of the Ahemussa, to Jemikh Ereshkigal, wife of two khans. Blessings on you. Thanks be.”

 

_We set up camp with the speed of long practice. Even I’m of some use, though I’ve had only eleven years to learn in, where Nanrahamma, and Tanet have had nearly two-hundred each, and even Noor has had plenty._

_The yurt has tasted the saltwaters of Azura’s Coast, where it was treated and made. It’s known the wind of Blacklight’s bay and the lapping waves of its Tide District. It’s been pitched on dry land – moored to a raft – and stretched out to make a coracle to bring us over waters. We carried it here in pieces, broken down and burdened between us._

_But around us are hasty-pitched tents of all sorts – shoddy lean-to shelters – things of canvas – things of hide – even true clansmer yurts like ours, painted and sturdy, doors hung with chimes of reed and bone._

_Together we are all of us an Exodus — the largest since the Red Year. All those who would not bend the knee to the Redoran when they made Blacklight theirs again._

_“They gave us a choice,” Noor tells me. Her voice is like running water. “Learn to be Redoran like them, living like a hive of kwama, all knowing their place and working one for all without ever thinking why. Or stay as we are, knowing who we are.”_

_Youngest of the three, she remembers I’m a child while Nanrahamma and Tanet sometimes forget. She knows how to explain things so I do not have to pretend to understand for fear of being called foolish._

_“So we came here,” I nod to say I follow her. “So you could keep being Vereansu, and I could be Ahemmusa?”_

_My face is open and I look into her face – smoother than theirs, with slanted copper eyes – and I map her marks with my gaze. I read them. She is One Who Sees, say the marks round her eyes. She is One Who Mourns, say the lines down her cheeks. She is One Who Heals, say the marks on her lower lip. She is not a full farseer, says her unscarred forehead._

_“Yes,” she smiles and nods back._

_“But we’ll be so far from home,” I say, frowning now. “We might not ever even see it again. What if that makes me forget? I don’t even have any real Ahemmusa lands to remember. I’ve never been further East than the far side of Blacklight bay!”_

_I am starting to panic. It is drawn through my voice like tautening nixgut._

_“Tam.” She calls me seriously by my closest name and sets a hand on my cold cheek. “How long d’you think it’s been since Nan saw the place she was born? Centuries. And has the wisdom leaked out of her? No, she’s still wise, wily, and Ahemmusa as all blazes — from deep in her bones to the ends of each hair on her head. D’you see?”_

_I shake my head. I can be honest with Noor._

_“We’re clansmer, Tam. Home’s wherever we are now. See?”_

_She gestures behind us and I look. There stands the yurt, with its chimes tolling gentle on the wind. And behind it stands a fallen tower, strung with old banners, and feathered inside with memories written in Dunmeris, some new, some old as the Red Year._

 

I set the wounds to healing. It’s always come easier to heal myself than others. I know my body in ways I could never know anyone else’s. I may not always know where all my limbs are, or how they relate to each other, but I know my body — I know how to mend myself.

It would be easier if I had snow to work with. Instead I have to make do with water from my travelling-skin, but the road and the riverside were thick with ravelbyne, so the tea comes easy enough. I steep three good pinches of the dried blue petals in water till steam rises to fill my throat and loosen the scabs left on my face.

It’s not alchemy really, and I know Nanrahamma would be disappointed, but if hedge-medicine’s the only option I’ve got then I’ll take all the help it can give.

I breathe the steam. The pain becomes abstract, letting me turn my senses inward and feel all round the hurt. I’ve broken nothing more serious than my skin. The rest is only swelling. The human either didn’t mean to properly injure me or didn’t know how. For all that it still stings bad enough.

Sat in front of the little fire I’ve made, hunched over the steaming tea-kettle, I start to hum in my heart-voice, deep and murmuring. My eyes are closed to help me see inside myself, but though I can’t see the spell at work, I can still feel it — coppery light just barely glinting on my skin, dancing over it, like dust backlit by a glowing sun.

 

_“Your mother never was much for magic. And as for your father, who knows about him. But Jemikh had me for a sister, and I was there whenever she needed a spell. Never had to learn to weave them for herself. As for you, Little Spark, you’ve got me for a teacher. Whether you like it or not – whether I like it or not – you’ve got me and you’ll learn.”_

_“Why? You said I wasn’t born right for it.”_

_“Birth’s only the beginning, Little Spark. After that, it’s all what you do and how you do it, and that can change from day to day, same as who you are depends on who you’re with. Boy-born you might be, and that’s a bad start. But you’ve got a head on your shoulders and not much else going for you — and that’s a good start too. Though ancestors only know where you get it from…”_

_Nanrahamma is talking about my mother again. Even just her name still makes me a useless kind of angry — anger that grows and saps anything else – any kind of doing – out of me like sadness does. So I can only listen while she talks._

_I wonder: if my mother had been much with magic, would she have been able to help herself better and make the poison stop? Nanrahamma says she thinks so. But Nanrahamma thinks that being a wise-womer’s the only thing worth being. Is that why she’s teaching me to be one too? Is that a kind of love?_


	6. Chapter 6

I clamber up, hand over hand, with my feet braced and my back hunched for balance. The stone is still rough despite its age — I’m less likely to lose my footing, but have already rubbed my palms and fingers raw. I rise and rise, managing not to look down beyond the placing of my hands. But still worry rises up along with me as I remember all the times in my life I’ve been called clumsy, and find I’ve forgotten why this ever seemed a good idea in the first place.

The climb steepens. My heart will burst; my guts are in knots. I can’t tell anymore whether I’m scared out of my wits or excited beyond sense. I am giddy but silent. All my thoughts have been balled up into one kind of concentration — I can’t think of what I’m doing; only how I’m doing it.

My breath comes quick and shallow, and that’s the only noise I allow myself. Hand over hand I climb, until there’s nothing left but empty air in front of me.

It’s like I break open, knowing I’ve made it. There’s so much open space around me I can’t help but fill it. I let out a whoop, then a hoot, raising my ragged voice along the sky’s big white underbelly. The gush of joy won’t let me fear the height, even when I look down.

This was an arch at one point, I think.

The stone is seamless as far as I can tell, so it can’t have been built. I remember the stories Tanet told me of the Earthbones, and I wonder if I’ve found one: a giant rib jutting from the ground, so old it looks like rock. But then I remember Nanrahamma, scolding me, and telling me how it’s almost never safe to take any story literally — even the ones that sound boring enough to be true. Instead I wonder if it was raised by magic, and that’s a heady thought too.

It broke at some point. The fragments of the arch’s other half litter the land below, but this piece still stands. It ribs up into the sky, and here I’ve clambered to the top. I ease myself down to sit astride the part that might’ve been its keystone.

At least a dozen times my height below, the country spreads dirt-coloured and flattish. Even the grass here is the colour of clay, and the trees are no colour at all. This land’s all scrub and stone, grown with weeds, yellow-headed flowers, and webby mats of root that look like old bloodstains from a distance.

The weather is warmer here, South from Windhelm and the Dunmeth road, and the ground has its own warmth too. It cracks open in places, like the lung-vents in the shell of a shalk. Clouds pour out of the cracks sometimes: rotten yellow sulphur; clean hot steam. Salty water bubbles up to stand in springs and pools in these parts — no good for drinking but fine for bathing, I’ve found.

Looking over it all, I think until I’m almost dreaming…

Those who live inland pay well for salt; how much could I simmer from the springwaters here? There are birds in the air but almost nothing crawling or running on the ground; yet I’ve seen bleached bones, and those birds are the hunting kind though I don’t know their names; things must live here. There is fire under the ground here, or else there’d be no steam or sulphur — does the Red Mountain have roots that reach even into Skyrim?

Coming up got harder as I went on. Coming down is easy once I start to move. I’m graceless – skinning my knees and hands, with my skirts hiked up into my sash so as not to get in the way, crawling backwards inch by inch – but eventually I reach solid ground again.

 

Hours pass as I walk. Time flows strange as I travel. I think I’m still in Eastmarch but wouldn’t know any better if I wasn’t. I tell myself that’s the point of the Harrowing: to find yourself by getting lost. But I also tell myself the Harrowing has as many points as a thicket of thorns, and it’s impossible to remember them all at once, let alone follow them.

I cast a spell to ask the wind which way it’s blowing, with a handful of dust and a whispered question in Dunmeris. The wind replies that it’s headed South-West. I read it like a lodestone compass, and know I’m still headed South. Like I have been since I left Refugees’ Rest behind, seeking out somewhere that still remembers Summer.

Here at least it’s warm enough that I can bear sleeping shelterless under the stars. One night I sleep in the hugging bole of a pine tree that, I think, got too tall and tired to live on — it left a skeleton of branches above me, and a matty-soft bed of dead needles round its thick trunk and roots. One night I slept beside a pool of slowly simmering water — motes of glimmering blue drifted under the surface, guarding off the dark but making me too cautious of the waters to bathe in them when morning came.

I spend days walking, gathering up deadwood, picking weeds, flowers, roots I find. I crush and mix the herbs with water, then taste the weak infusion to figure out their uses or dangers. The blood-red roots taste like iron and earth, but they ease energy back into me when I’ve used myself up with working spells to keep me fed and keep track of my course. I take to chewing them when I find them, spitting out reddish mulch when I’m done coaxing the juice from a piece.

I listen out for the hunting-birds as I go. They don’t sing to each other like the small birds that mark morning in Windhelm. Instead they’re like the coast-racers back in Blacklight — they call out in triumph when they make a kill, and are silent and serious all the rest of the time. It’s a slow listening with them, but gradually I learn to compel them with my head-voice.

I see one in the sky, circling one day. I ask for a share of its prey. That’s how I find out there are dust-coloured hares living here too, hidden from my eyes but not the birds’. Every so often one finds its way into my pot thanks to them, and in turn I share back my leavings: bones, skins, the worst of the gristle.

The last of my travel-bread is gone, and the cold-cooked fish I took from the White River, gone too. Nanrahamma always told me clansmer were never meant to eat bread anyway. Perhaps I’m better off this way, under the eyes of my ancestors. I ask myself if it’s their approval I feel, warm in my belly — or is it just tea taken alone for the sixth night in a row, and my own small embers of pride at fending for myself like this.

Time flows as I travel on. Days pass as I walk.

 

I find things often in the salt-marshes and flats, but still I see no-one. The land remains huge, and open, and empty. I don’t mind, for I’ve neglected my hair — it tangles like a halo of fire round the head of a saint in an Old Temple icon. Knowing almost for certain I’m alone, and will probably be alone for a while yet, has a kind of freedom in it.

This morning I saw a tall spindly tree through the fog that’s started to gather at dawn. Smaller shrubs stunted upwards from the hard clay of the ground nearby, almost like a garden with the wiry tree for its centerpiece.

I came closer and saw the branches were weighed down with fruit, and the scrubby grass and dirt below were littered with windfalls. They were neatly round with shining red skins — all crowned with a little tuft of leaves, all new and nameless to me.

I crouched and plucked up one of the windfalls, then bit into its flesh. It was sugary as plums; soft as ripe dates. I remembered the taste. I’d never seen them fresh, but remembered them from the markets of Blacklight — flattened and dried, dusted with white and sweet inside, piled onto trader’s stalls at the turning of the year.

“Persimmon,” I said to myself. “I remember you.”

Quick as I could, I scooped a number of windfalls into my sling-sack. All the while I sucked the flesh from the first fresh persimmon I’d ever tasted, and decided I was done with the harvest only when I’d spat out the last papery-skinned pip.

Now afternoon draws on. The sun pulls long shadows from the jagged fingers of stone that loom up from the earth before me. All of Skyrim is filled with things that belong to the past but still linger on into the present, it seems — something built from stone stood here once, and now it lies in ruins, stripped to the foundations. Springwaters and steam gurgle up between cracks in the stone, and make channels between the fallen pillars.

I comb the ruins for salt-crusted bones, scraps of old pottery, twists and gnarls of rusted iron. I forget whether I’m searching for the sake of selling these things one day, or whether I’m gathering bits of the past for their own sake. My time’s my own, I decide — my purpose hardly matters.

The sky darkens. It’s pondering rain.

I ponder too: Did someone plant that persimmon tree? Someone living still? Should I have left a copper or two for taking a share of their fruit?


	7. Chapter 7

_His name is Amarin. When the sky groaned with thunder – and the ground turned sucking with mud under my boots – and I was almost blind and almost drowned with wet – he took me in from the rain. His name is Amarin and he is kind._

_Like an island on a stormy sea, the shelter’s nothing much, but seems a whole world – precious; luxurious – in this raging wash of night._

_It’s a pool of light from a kind of campfire, made out of a staved in tree-stump, with the flames eating it outward from within, and bathing us both in red and gold. It’s a stretched awning, hoisted with rope and stretched overhead and across one side — it cracks and shudders like a ship’s sail halfway in tack; but that is only the rain and the wind, both outside, unable to get to me anymore. It’s two antlers, and his knife busy carving one with a scrape – and a scrape – and a scraping sound. It’s a round-bellied pot above the fire-stump, bubbling gently and smelling warm, livid, rich without excess._

_“It’s venison,” he says. His voice is like muscles moving under skin. His voice is like clean sweat. “Barking deer. Caught and dressed her yesterday. Hung her till the rains came and I had to take her down early. If you hadn’t already gotten caught out in it, I’d say this is your lucky night. Plenty of meat to go round.”_

_I look at him across the fire. I look over from him, to the red heap that’s been turned partly into meat, and partly into hide, but is mostly still a deer. It’s small — maybe the size of a dog. I look into the sheltered flames._

_“I’ve never eaten venison,” I say._

_Tanet always said it’s food for Nords – whose meat is always too strong, and whose cooking is always too bland – but Nanrahamma scolded her and told her not to put those ideas into my head. House Velothi ideas. A good clansmer, Nanrahamma told me, knows it’s a sin against common sense to waste meat when meat is given. (She’d tell her story after that, almost always — the one about the Western knight who starved in the ashlands because he wouldn’t admit the horse he’d kept fed could feed him right back.)_

_I say: “It smells good.” And I try to smile, but I think I look too much like a drowned rat to wear anything but a grimace in honesty. I am also too hungry not to heed Nanrahamma’s advice._

_“Ought to be,” he says. “I know the secret to good venison stew, after all.” He taps his crooked nose and pauses like people do before they let slip the last piece of a joke. “Don’t let a Nord cook it!”_

_I think I laugh._

_I don’t know him – only his name – but I’m almost comfortable. He’s Dunmer too, though his hair is the colour of straw, and his accent has more of Skyrim in it than mine. He is kind. I think he is kind._

_I shuffle closer to the fire until steam rises off my sodden smock. I wring water out of my hair. I cannot tell if I’m blushing from the heat or from him – talking to him – and from what I’m going to say next._

_I tell him my name — the long one I give to strangers who are almost not strangers anymore._

 

I lost days somewhere along the way. I think maybe it’s the emptiness my days had out in the plains and salt-springs, before I came here — they got so much the same as each other I forgot to keep on remembering.

Darkwater Crossing’s not a large village. There are fisherman’s huts down by the creek and a youngish mine broken into the ground near the water. There’s the thinned out edge of a forest on the southern side of things, and a carpenter and prentice who fell alder and hickory from the treeline, shape the wood, passing the chips and shavings on to the fishermen to smoke their catch. A cluster of boardings for the miners; a pitching ground for traveller’s tents; a plot of common-soil, neglected in the cold weather. That’s Darkwater Crossing.

All the same, I’ve stayed. The mine brings in newcomers often, and traders come and go, so the locals don’t mind strangers that don’t mind them. They tolerate another Velothi among them, even. But his manners are Western, his accent nearly Nordic, and his arm’s strong-turned to work in the mine.

My accent is hard to place because it’s placeless, with roots only defined by their own three uprootings — still, it’s thick and foreign when I speak Tamrielic. I’m clansmer in my customs, and I won’t mine, and they’ve seen me sitting by the creek with my feet in the waters, singing a whiskery catfish up from the mud to skin, and bake in leaves there on the bank. They don’t like me, and my magic and manners are more to blame than the colour of my skin.

But there was a saying in the Quarter: a Nordic sword has two edges. They dislike us, and sometimes they’ll show it cruelly; but mostly they’ll shun us, and let us well alone — sometimes that’s almost a blessing. Strange and paradoxical, it’s almost earnt me a place in Darkwater Crossing.

The hamlet’s too small to have a mayor, too petty for a prince, too placid to have a khan. Anyone who stays here more than a month knows everyone else in town. Instead they have an elder, who can speak for the whole Crossing because everyone here thinks the same way — they’ve only been thinking it for the longest. Darkwater Crossing has an elder, and Gerthel is her name.

 

_She comes to me by the water’s edge._

_I sleep and sit here, in near-sight of the hamlet but not quite in it. A willow tree grows here and spreads its shade and branches over me. It’s shelter at least from the wind. I’ve been here only a short while, but long enough to leave my mark — a scorched patch of bank where I’ve lit more than one fire, and let each go cold._

_Now the day is at its deepest part, and the sun’s high up and darting down through the switchy limbs of willow. It’s golden-feeling on my upturned face till I turn and see her, coming to me from the other bank. She is barefoot, with skirts held up past her knees. She treads through the shallows from Darkwater Crossing, confident with age._

_She stands dripping under the eaves of my willow, by the ashes of my fire. This is my place and I have to tell myself:_

_She is a Nord, her customs are Nordic; she’ll give you no visitor’s gift, so don’t start expecting one._

_She’s intruding, but only as much as I am in her hamlet. She is white-haired and hard-faced. She wears everything she is like a mask fixed in old-woman kindness. It makes it hard to tell what she’s about from moment to moment. I look at her feet, her hands, her left shoulder, expectantly. She is meant to speak first._

_“Your time’s your own, so I won’t borrow any more than I’ve need of,” she says, briskly. “You’ll do me the favour of imagining I’d said the right greetings, and I’ll cut to, and say what needs said.”_

_I look at her then from side on. My left eye has been blurry since Refugee’s Rest — now my full attention comes from an angle, head cocked, watching like a falcon watches. I rub the fabric of my smock between my thumb and forefinger; I scuff the heel of one boot into the bank, digging a small dent there. I nod and she carries on._

_“We’ve got a lot of love for how we live hereabouts. Means there’s not much love left for what falls outside that, far as some are concerned. I won’t honey it, there’s some don’t like you here. An elf, and witching, across the creek from them fishing the usual way...”_

_I want to tell her: this is how I usually fish – my usual way – a child could do it – as a child, I did. But instead I listen._

_“Way I see it, we all use what the gods above give us, and you can skin and bone your catch well enough with no magic to speak of — I’ve seen that myself. But I speak for Darkwater Crossing, and the Crossing’s been doing a lot of speaking about you. There’s many of a mind to run you off, but I’ll tell you, there’s many among them who’re none too bright. I’m of a different mind, if you’ll hear?”_

_“I’m still listening, elder,” I say in Tamrielic._

 

It’s a shack of sorts. The frame is clapped together from unsanded boards and propped against the wide hull of an old tree. The rest is thatched with watered clay, and underbrush, and branches. Inside, the walls feel like a badger’s set, or a kwama’s nest. From the outside, it can look like almost nothing.

It was a hunting screen, and still is in fairer weather and warmer times, for one of the villagers or another. Dug a little into the ground, it’ll be cold storage through Winter, but it was mostly empty when I came to fill it, and change it by living from it.

Outside, I’ve made a small firepit. Inside I’ve made a nest of my sleeping-skin. My sling-sack hangs from a knob hooked out of the tree-trunk. Inside that, are all the things I treasure, and use to remind me of the strange and changing thing ‘home’ should mean to me.

It’ll get colder in time. But for now, it’s what Gerthel gave me: a place on the ridge just above the Crossing; outside the village, but only by a single stone’s throw. A compromise, and a gift, in return for a promise.


	8. Chapter 8

_The stew is unseasoned and starkly simple. Its flavour is mostly meat: dark and earthy – briars and brambles – a taste that’s richly crushed-whelk-purple. It’s in the chewy chunks of venison, and the thin savoury liquor they’ve given off in cooking._

_It’s almost too much for me and my clamouring hungering belly. The rain is a constant hiss, hard and regular above us. But here we sit in a kind of peace, where Amarin has rigged his shelter. We make a noisy kind of silence. Our teeth set to work on each morsel; our lips slurp at what’s left in our bowls._

_“It’s good,” I groan. My tongue feels thick around the words._

_For weeks I’ve lived on rabbits, roots, and an emptying sack of overripe persimmons. Now the stew overwhelms me. The rain rises to a din in my ears. Amarin’s lips move but I can’t make sense of what he says._

_He’s smiling though. I think he is kind._

 

I haven’t eaten pomegranates since Blacklight. There we called them eggfruit, for the way their seeds fit together, packed in like the cells in a kwama egg. Here, this one red fruit is a prize as much as a memory, traded from a long-whiskered Khajiit. He had a whole hay-packed crate of them, while I had my work of recent days: pens and charms and knife-hilts; small things, all scrimshawed from the bones of birds and hares.

Darkwater Crossing changes when traders come to call. The firepit by the smokers’ huts, and the fishermen’s upturned boats, begins to swirl with crowds till it’s beating like a heart. Locals teem and circulate where the merchants lay their wares, on mats and improvised counters made from the same crates their goods travelled in.

Shops make me unsure. They’re static places, filled with numbers, where coin does most of the talking, and mostly talks too loud. But markets like this, I understand a little better. From across the creek I saw them – stalls and traders; goods and customers, clamouring – and I couldn’t stay away.

Over the creek and down the hill, a fire’s been lit. Night is gathering now, cold but dry. Outside my burrow, I have my own little heaping of brush and driftwood, both plentiful in this deepening Autumn. The fruit sits amongst the folds of my sling-sack, precious and waiting by my side as I whisper into my hands, and rub them together over the steepled up kindling and dry leaves.

With a sound like my whisper re-echoed, the sticks begin to smolder. It’s only a very small spell, but I only need a small fire. It feels good to work it here in peace, with small pride in my small works of magic, and without disapproving eyes to tell me no. I suppose that’s why Gerthel gave me this place — I won’t trouble the Crossing here, and its folk won’t trouble me.

I lower myself to sit next to the growing fire, and reach over to pluck up my half-eaten pomegranate. In amongst its little cells, I set my fingers greedily to work. Soon they’re red as the fire burns gold. I suck the seeds and swallow them one by one.

Counting them, I try to count the days since I crossed the ice from Windhelm. There was a month perhaps. Then rain. After that I lose count.

 

_“I’ve been travelling…A month or so maybe. I’m trying to keep count, but I’ve never been good at it — but if I don’t I won’t know when I can go home. No, not home. The Morayat. Nan, and Tanet, and Windhelm. Back to—…D’you know what a Harrowing is?”_

_The words flow clumsy, like lost things, running blind. There is a blank look on Amarin’s face. I have slipped between languages and back. I garble myself and talk too much. My tongue and mind are loosened. I don’t remember if I am drunk or not. But I must be — must be._

_By the time I stop talking, I’ve forgotten where I began. I am tired._

 

This place is a vantage point. From beside my fire I can see the whole dark grassy slope and the jut of sheer rock — together they make up the long and short ways down to the creek and Darkwater Crossing.

I’ve been lost in thought. Though not quite dreaming, my eyes were cauled over, and I watched the path to the creek without giving myself a chance to see. I blink and rub with a knuckle at my eyelids, then turn the good side of my gaze on the slope. Lights dance up out of the darkness. Torches and voices hurry this way.

I clamber into a crouch and start to listen. What leaves are left on the trees whisper constantly in the wind. Underneath their murmur, the forest’s naked limbs make moan. My fire mutters and its embers spit. There, in amongst the wider matting of sounds, is the part of each that would speak to me if I listened just a little harder. But I’m listening out for living voices, not the wisdom of the dead. I hear past that under-sound and make out words.

“…No-one’s asking me, I know, but I don’t like it.”

“You’re right. No-one was asking you.”

“Ain’t natural, if you ask me—…”

“Which no-one is.”

“Let nature run its course, that’s what I say. If she dies, she dies, and that’s that, the way the gods will it.”

“Call me old-fashioned, but I remember a time when folks trusted themselves to use what the gods’ve given us. Tools, brains, muscles — even magic. You want to sit in pig-ignorance and see the will of the gods in every bit of nastiness you come across, I won’t stop you — but keep it to yourself and away from my kin, or by my oath I’ll show you you’re not too old for a thrashing.”

Gerthel’s voice carries distinctive and clear through the shadows. I made her a promise, a week or more back. Now she’s come to collect it.

 

_“I remember when we had our own crone here at the Crossing,” Gerthel says. “Not a fancy mage by any means, such as the sort that has books by the dozen and learning enough to stuff their pride with. But she had a way with goats, and sick children, and hard births. Died before times changed enough that she’d have been driven out of town anyway. Never could decide if it was her good luck or the Crossing’s bad…”_

_I know what she wants me to promise before she makes me promise it._

_“You want me to be like her for you,” I say in jumbled Tamrielic._

_I speak quickly and thoughtlessly, like I always do when my pride spots a chance to show how clever I am. Like a child who answers too quick and canny to hear the whole of the question. I slow myself down to phrase things more carefully:_

_“I mean…You want a mage around, in case something bad happens to Darkwater Crossing. That’s why you want me to owe you a favour, isn’t it?”_

_“Aye, you could say that. Seems only fair to me.”_

 

They’re in the clearing and upon me. My heart is thrashing like a snared rabbit. Sweat prickles on my brow despite the cold. I stand to greet them and try to stand tall, but my shoulders have always sloped, and my footing feels uncertain. I know my voice will be faint if I speak, so I remain silent. This is my place after all — it’s only right that they speak first.

“You’ll forgive the intrusion,” says Gerthel. She steps forward to stand on the far side of my fire. “And imagine if you like that I said all I should’ve said — gifts and greetings, as ways run with your folk. But I’ve come about my own, and one of them doesn’t have much time.”

My stomach knots. I feel like I am starving. But I turn my sidelong look on her, and on the other two men. One is tall and broad, with a beard the colour of steel, and a hatchet in his hand. The other is younger and known to me — his name is Fauld; he is Gerthel’s grandson. A bow is strung and ready in his grip.

Goats; sick children; hard births. Their faces are harder than that. They’re armed. They’ve come for something worse. No room for refusal.

“Lead the way,” I tell them thinly. My fire is left burning, alone on the hill.

They take me through the night with torches held out. We hurry, and I try so hard not to stumble that I hardly note the way we take until we stop walking.

We stand at the door of a lodge, where the outskirts of the hamlet and the fringes of the forest overlap. A light flickers inside. Outside, a young stag is hung by its heels from the bare branches of an apple tree. I am not squeamish, but I can’t look at it — my mind starts to crawl when I look at it.

 

_The night is hotter than it should be. My skin feels loose and slithering, as if I’m about to shed it. My mouth is stinging-nettle numb. Flower-pepper numb. I taste sap. Bile. Bitter vinegar. I am tired. I cannot hear the rain. Let me lie down. Let me sleep._

 

Gerthel gestures and I duck under the heavy wool curtain, into the flickering light. The lodge is sweltering-hot. A fire roars in the middle of the one rounded common room, so bright it dazzles me. I shield my eyes till I can see clearly.

A young boy sweats so much I cannot tell at first that he’s crying as he works a set of bellows by the fireside. Next to him is a pile of furs, cloaks, and blankets. A pale and waxen face is nestled amongst the shuddering pile — a woman, lips almost blue. The boy has Fauld’s crow-coloured hair, but his mouth is like the pale woman’s, only pink.

“It’s her, isn’t it?” I say, not knowing if I’m speaking to myself or to Fauld. I am looking at the woman and my thoughts hammer against each other in my head. “She’s your – your wife – is that your word? – his mother – mother of your child…” I pause and try to breathe. “What happened?”

“We were in the woods,” says Fauld. “Not deep, just walking, looking for chestnuts. But we were on our own and something came out of the trees and—…It was on her, on Marel. I got it but I wasn’t—…I wasn’t quick enough.”

His voice is fragile too, like it’s been pulled tight and worn thin. When Gerthel speaks she’s calm as the sky before a storm:

“It bit her. Poisoned her. My son’s wife. Mother of my grandchildren.”

“Children?” I say. I am buying time with empty words, trying to recall all I know about poisons, and trying not to remember too deeply why I know as much as I do about them. “Where are the others?”

“Other,” Gerthel corrects me grimly. “It’s on the way.” She points to the poisoned woman.

I kneel next to her and peel back the sweat-soaked pelts. Even in the heat of the room, she’s shivering cold and frozen half mad. Her dress is plastered to her. Her belly is round and full beneath it. Her eyes are cloudy and see straight through me.

“On the way,” I repeat to myself quietly. There are two lives at stake. I run a shaking hand through my damp forelocks. I made a promise. “Fauld,” I say, “the thing that came out of the trees — where is it now?”

“Burnt,” says the other older bearded man, with pride. “That’s the only thing to do, to send a demon screaming back into Oblivion.”

“A…demon?” I say slowly, letting the meaning sink in. “A daedroth? Oh.” It’s hard to breathe. The things I want to say nearly choke me. He’s killed her — the soil-tied small-minded cultish ignorant little peon. “Oh,” is all I let myself say.

My mind is racing. I need to catch up. I can’t brew an antidote, but there are still ways to save her, if I am quick and can keep the poison slow

I hold my open palms just over her trembling body. I can feel the cold of her from inches away. Black whorls gather round the veins at her temples, and neck, and her eyelids. It’s frostbite venom — a woodsman worth anything at all should’ve known better.

“You can save her,” says Gerthel. “You’ll save them both.”

“I—…Yes. Just let me – give me a moment – to think.” I am lying. I’m lying to her. “Fauld, and you too, you’re woodsmen – hunters – yes? You know your herbs? I need yellow ravelbyne, thistledirk, wax – beeswax, not tallow. Gerthel? I need wild garlic. Quickly, please.”

They dash out into the night once more, all but the boy, who still works the bellows, weeping silently, sweating heavily. “Keep on with that,” I say to him, “she can’t get colder than this — understand?”

I struggle out of my smock till I’m down to my under-shift. My arms are bare now, and glistening with sweat in the forge-like heat and forge-like light. ‘Clever is the womer who adds always a third part,’ I recite to myself. I added the fourth to make sure they don’t all come back too soon.

Alchemy won’t be enough to cure her — it’ll only slow the poison down. This is a familiar realisation. It bites close to the bone.

I close my eyes and I start to listen. Beyond the fire, and the rhythm of the bellows, and the two humans breathing – the boy, quick and wrenched; his mother, shallow and faint – I listen until I can hear a distant strain of song.


	9. Chapter 9

_I lie on my side. Eyes open, I watch without moving. Can’t or won’t — I don’t know anymore. My whole throat is numb. I can’t feel myself breathe or make myself breathe now. (Can’t or won’t?) But I must be, must be, because I’m still watching, and can’t or won’t close my eyes. They itch. My head is filled with itching. The rest of me is throat. No, numb, the rest of me is numb and still. And still I see. He lies. No, lied, and sits now not looking at me. His eyes are on a sword, like his hands are on the sword, and the sword moves along a sound with a shrike-shrike sound. No, stone. The sword moves along a stone. Shrike. Shrike. Shrike._

 

I work with my use-knife. I shred the stems of thistles; press nectar from ravelbyne petals; and with the flat and the back of the blade I fold the two into beeswax. That is one, and two, and three — the trinities Nanrahamma swore by in most things; in alchemy most of all.

“A wick,” I say to the lodge: the boy still sweating and working the bellows; Fauld and the other one foolish as fog. Not to Gerthel — she’s not yet returned, which is just as well.

Stupidity’s often loud. Here it roars silent, all the response I get.

“Or something else – anything else…Widow’s tears!” I hiss in Dunmeris, letting myself curse as my patience gets thin. “Ancestors save me from whatever blunted you two.”

I try to breathe. I am trying to make myself even that way, but the woman can only gasp. Her lungs shudder and her breath comes shallow. It is getting harder to be clever and cold.

“A reed,” I finally say. “Small – thin – like for a lamp. Get me one. And more fuel for the fire. Hurry!”

Fauld’s eyes look pink by the blazing firelight. The face of the other is as stony and solid as his block of a brain. They look at each other and rush out again into the night.

I take this chance to listen again. I search amongst the sounds around me until I find the right thread: the poison-song at work in this woman. It’s louder now, more certain — that’s how I know time’s shortening, when already it was too short.

I realise I am muttering in my mothertongue, cursing again despite myself. “Spill out my ghost and let it fall silent, I can’t, I can’t…” I press into my neck with one hand, worrying at my throat, then fretting the fingertips against my mouth. It’s only the taste of thistle and ravelbyne on my hand that warn me I’ve fallen into that old habit.

The reed wick comes to me after that. I fold it into the wax I’ve made and start it burning from an edge of the fire. I would start it with magic any other time, but Fire-Calling asks much of me, and I must save my strength now.

Soon the alchemy’s fumes fill the air. I set the candle I’ve made in front of the woman, and I hope she’ll gulp down at least a little of the smoke. It will slow the poison. It’ll give me minutes maybe.

I close my eyes and listen. I still have my use-knife waiting in my hand. I hear the poison-song, louder and getting louder still — I can hear it over the fire, the bellows, all our breath coming and going together. I close my left fist round the blade of my use-knife. I pull. Pain blazes across my palm and the hurt is familiar.

 

_He speaks but I can’t understand the words. The language isn’t mine. I know that. But it’s Tamrielic. Somehow some part of me knows that too. I can’t make out the words. He levels the sword and I see his gaze run down it like rain into my eyes. I want to close them but I can’t. I’m tired but can’t sleep. I think: why does a hunter need a sword? I think – no, thought – he was kind._

 

There are signs I need to trace on her forehead, down the middle of her chest, and on her swollen belly. I try to sign them as quick as I can. Behind me, the Nords are talking quickly. The words are hard but I can’t afford to listen. They haven’t stopped me yet, and that’s enough.

I keep my palm tight-closed, and only open it to wet the fingers of my right hand in blood. It hurts. I’m not brave and never have been, but this is the only way I know I can maybe help. I think: please let it help.

 

_“It’s called the Sharing,” says Nanrahamma. “It’s a gift to us, from the oldest of our ancestors – the ones that came before the world was made – and it’s the most important thing I’ll teach you, so prick up those ears and listen, blast you, else I’ll start to remember why you might not be worth it after all.”_

_I train my eyes straight on her face. The lines and hard angles, seen through her pipe-fumes, familiar as the face itself. I try to look attentive and make my ears perk up, but all I can do is feel them blushing, hot and prickly._

_“Better,” she says. “Now — the Sharing. There’s a limit to the power you can hold in yourself, yes? For working spells and suchlike? The Sharing is sacred because it’s a way to slip past that limit — to heal ills that’re beyond your power to heal. And that’s all it must be used for, d’you hear me? For healing. For good. The magic still has a price, and the Sharing can help you cover it, but it doesn’t lessen the cost. Someone’s still got to pay it — someone, somewhere along the Line.”_

_The Line. She inflected the word unexpectedly. Not a line on a map, or a line of script, or a laundry-line. But a Line — the same word we use and inflect in our tongue to mean the Lines on a face as it ages – the Lines that run blood through the body – the Lines that trace palms and the pads of our fingers in ways that are no-one’s but our own._

_“I don’t understand,” I say. I don’t use those words lightly around Nanrahamma, as I do around Tanet — only when I most need to. But she said herself, this is important. So I confess. “’The Line’?”_

_Her face does not turn stormy as it usually does when I prove her right about how I was never meant to know these things or start along this path. She is simply quiet for a moment. When she answers, she answers simply and in a voice that’s almost kind — like she used to use with me, before she became my teacher and was just my aunt._

_“Family,” she says. “Blood. Bones. Do you understand?”_

_“I think so.”_

_“Pray you never have to. Pity I’ve still got to show you…”_

 

We share no Lines. I can’t pay the cost for her. I had to find another way. Not even knowing whether Nords can Share as we can, I tried. All I could give was the blood to start it.

It’s quick but far from clean. The woman has been silent since I came into the lodge, except her quick shallow breaths. But she starts to wail. Then the sounds become sobs. Then the sobs fray themselves into silence again — just breath; sighing in; sighing out.

Blood stains the pelts and her clothes. New wet gushes of it. It’s black, and the black marks of the poison under her skin have turned scar-silver. Blood is pooling around her legs and pooling between us. Black on the ground; black on the grey and brown furs; blacker than black on my hands.

I am seized. Something tightens round my throat. Something shouts in my ear, so close that hearing hurts.

 

_Pain comes like dawn through the numbness. It’s sharp and sharpens me. I struggle before I know I’m struggling. The sword never reaches my throat. I stop it with my hands. Trying is hot on my face, wet between my fingers, pouring over me. My head is filled with pleading, but not to him. I beg for fire._


	10. Chapter 10

_He recoils. Lurches back. The stench of burning hair, like a cry and the echo of a cry. Smoke pours from him. He looks like the tapestries say that bad ghosts look. And I am trying to get up. An animal noise rises and I realise it’s mine. Whine or growl, it comes from my throat. My hands — my hands are slick with struggling._

_It’s a cold night but the air around me teems. Forgotten spices carried with grit on hot long-travelling winds. The kind of warmth that nearly blisters. I wear it like he wears smoke. I begged for fire. I set myself aflame. I am unburnt — he is mostly unhurt. He shouts. He still has the sword._

_I am crouching. Maybe I’m trying to spring. Maybe a crouch is the closest I can come to standing. I am still sluggish, still half-numb. The sword is dark with my blood. He gave me shelter. I thought he was kind. The warmth and light I begged to life around me start to gutter._

 

In the dark I’ve started to piece things together. It’s not a choice so much as a way to make sense of the black around me. Here without sight, my mind’s eye throws out memory onto the walls of where they’ve put me. That’s how the lost days come crawling back.

I remember Amarin, and just remembering is like a kick, hard in the stomach. I taste bile. I taste blood again from where something split my lip more recently. But I was hurt in all sorts of small ways before they finally put me here in the dark. The dull throb of those little hurts makes time into timelessness, but anchors me in my body, and helps me remember I am not limitless or empty — I’m not this whole darkness, but a body waiting somewhere inside it.

I try to feel each in turn until I’ve mapped out most of myself. Split lip; bruised throat; bruised belly and painful ribs; skinned knees; grazed elbows; the ragged throb of my opened left palm. Over and over like a mantra. Cut off from the open sky and open air, the magic I have in me comes only in a slow trickle. I put it towards healing, but the healing’s slower still.

It’s a root-cellar, I think, or else something like it. Tight as a grave with a hatch over the top, a knotted length of rope down one side for coming and going. Darkwater Crossing doesn’t have a jail, or even crow-cages like the worst kind of smugglers and any kind of corsairs were hung up in, over Blacklight Bay. So instead Gerthel and her people made do, and jailed me here. I don’t think they know what else to do. I don’t think I blame them.

 

_A light screams down from above. They’ve opened the hatch. It takes moments of cowering and blinking in the packed dirt of my grave – no, cell – for me to realise it’s only moonlight. But even the stars burn after all this dark._

_Someone crouches at the mouth of the hatch. I can’t see their face, only their shadow and their shape, but I can feel them looking down at me. When they speak, it’s in Gerthel’s voice:_

_“Ready to explain yourself?” Her voice is cracked and hoarse. She sounds more her age than ever I’ve heard her before. “After all the good-will I showed you, and made my people show you, hm? Why? D’you want to know what I think? I think you took it all as spite. Asked you nice enough to pull up roots from down by the creek, gave you a roof beyond town, and for nothing but a promise. And you twisted it. Witch.”_

_She spits that word. I feel it land on me — wet and suddenly hot. I flinch and shrink from it. The hatch closes and I’m in the dark again for I don’t know how long. I count my aches and collect my thoughts. Then the hatch opens again and I know once more that it’s Gerthel._

_“You took it as spite and twisted the promise,” she says as if no time at all has passed. She’s been rehearsing this. “You put a bane on a woman who’s good as a daughter to me. Witch. All because I hurt your pride. But you’re too crafty to’ve left it at that, hm? You knew I’d want your help. The promise stuck in and you twisted it like a knife.”_

_I’m silent. I let her words fall on me. I let the moonlight fall too._

_“You took off the bane and made it something worse with your blood-spells. Took something even more precious, didn’t you? My great-grandchild. My unborn great-grandchild, you filthy thing. Either you didn’t know how that would hurt, or you knew just how much it would, and I don’t know what’s worse…”_

_Her voice is ragged and wet now. Something falls onto me. I think it’s her disdain again, spat out onto me. But it’s cold, then slowly turns warm, melting on my skin. Snow._

_“So,” she says. She sounds tired. “D’you need to explain yourself now? Or have I just about got you right? For a crafty little thing, you’re awfully simple, aren’t you? Hm?”_

_When I speak, my voice is dry and brittle as Autumn leaves, half-dead from disuse._

_“I could only save one,” I say. “I chose. Simple.”_

 

At one point I might even have said I’m sorry. I think I’m too far gone for that now. I was afraid, then I grieved, then I seethed angry for a time. Memory is most of what I have now, and hunger when I remember that I should be hungry. But the hunger’s such a constant, I barely know where it begins or ends.

I have water from somewhere. Bones with straggling scraps of meat, and mushrooms sometimes too, thrown down into the cellar with me. I am not forgotten completely. But I’m always hungry, and always thirsty, and it’s hard to think. Remembering is only slightly easier.

I’ve seen moonlight and starlight. They sang magic down and into me. Healing comes a little quicker and a little easier for it.

I am unwashed. Cold seeps down from the world above, and I only have my under-shift for warmth. My smock was left behind somewhere, and my sling-sack too. I shiver, dirt against dirt.

 

_I can’t fight him. Can’t becomes couldn’t. I couldn’t fight him. I am drugged, and anger at how stupid I was to trust him – a stranger – wells up in me distant and useless as if it belonged to someone else. Or is it shame?_

_We struggled on the ground till my hands were sticky with blood. I called on those who came before to help, but they could only help so much. The numbness returned and is still returning. My sprung crouch becomes a slump. I am heaped and limp as a net of fish._

_Amarin kneels next to me and brings his sword close. My eyes are wide. I would tremble if I could. I’m afraid to die. That rises up above the anger and shame and everything else. I am afraid of dying._

_He sets the flat of the blade against my side. On the fabric of my smock, he wipes it clean. He is humming to himself. He is busying himself with lengths of rope. He is trussing my aching hands. The blood from each of my palms seeps together and meets._

_I would scream if I could. Terror or rage — I don’t know which. I am still breathing. He never meant to kill me. After all, he is a hunter, and some prey are better kept alive._

 

Light breaks over me again. This time it’s blinding. I’ve spent timeless formless flows of time, thinking to myself and saying to myself what I might say to Gerthel — ways to curse her and her lot, and all their oceans of ignorance; ways to say that I had no choice; ways to say that I wish I had and I’m sorry I hadn’t, without truly saying that I am sorry for what I’ve done, but only for her loss. The light burns it all from my mind.

This time something comes down from it, clambering toward me, into the shadows. It’s man-sized and man-shaped. I blink against the light. I think: it’s daylight, for the first time in so long. I think: here’s a man Gerthel’s sent in her stead, to do what she can’t — to hurt me or worse; why else would he come down?

I try to make words. Like a nightmare, all that comes is senseless noise, worse than silence — my throat can’t decide whether to go with a hiss or a whimper. I back into a filthy corner and try to make out this man, with my bad eye and good eye both trained dizzy on him. He towers. His hair and the beginnings of his beard are dark.

“This is yours,” Fauld says.

He flings something onto me. It covers me, swamping me, and I struggle in it as if it were a net — until I feel the fabric of it. It’s my smock. I clutch it to myself and pull it round about me like a blanket. I’m suddenly conscious of my bare arms and bare freckled shoulders.

“This too,” he says, and drops my sling-sack before me. “Mother Gerthel gave you over to me. To my judgement. So here it is.”

“I—…” I gape and rub at my eyes with the back of my wrist. For a moment I look up and into his face, and meet his eyes with my clear eye. He stands and seems framed by a window of sky, coldly blazing blue. “Why?”

“My wife is alive. You did that.”

“I did,” I say. Nodding slowly, I confess it to him. “And I lost your child.” I offer it to him as a tool, to break me with, or else to cast aside.

“We can have other children, but there could only ever be one of her. I think I—…It feels—…” It’s his turn now to struggle for words. “I can’t forgive you,” he finally says, “but I can understand. Your choice — I would’ve chosen the same. Only I can’t go on with—…You’re an open wound, elf. I want to close it. Forget and move on. Maybe then she’ll be able to do the same.”

“You haven’t come to kill me. You starved me – I forgot daylight because of you – you beat me. But you haven’t come to kill me.”

“No. I haven’t — I can’t. Mother Gerthel said I should give my sentence, so here it is. Don’t come back. Not ever. The rest is your business. D’you hear me?”

“I hear you.”


	11. Chapter 11

I was struck and kicked, and buried in the dark to shrink or fester. Instead I slowly healed. But it’s like the purpose has been beaten from me, and the life leeched out. Like a sapling grows pale and thin when locked away from the light. For a while I could only stand in the sun, blind and blinking, and overwhelmed by the taste of the wind and its touch on my face.

After that I begin to walk. I don’t think to find North with magic, or plot out any sort of path. I’m aimless. I stretch my legs, walking, and it hurts as I learn the workings of my muscles again. But the jabbing pain of it is also the deepest bliss I can remember. A traveller almost dead of thirst, when they find water, will drink and drink, and drink till they’re swollen and aching, and still they’ll want to drink more.

The abrupt rise of mountains far off and white against the cold blue sky. The cracked dry ground, vividly brown. The web of roots that breaks it open, ploughlike, in furrows patterned to nonsense. The leafless trees and the trees that’re still green, bristling with needles, proud in the breeze. The wind, the wind, the wind — just hearing it. All are beautiful, at least for a while.

My legs tire quickly, and as my eyes adjust, my mind does the same. I sit down by the parched bank of a river. The run of water’s skinny with cold; there must be ice at its source. But the sound of the brook is sweet, and I’m thirsty, and filthy though already too cold to properly bathe.

I look down at my half-numb fingers. I unclench my fists, turn over my hands, to see my palms — clearly now, for the first time in how long? Since I lost days to Amarin, not wanting to remember what he did. Since I cut open my hand to save the poisoned woman.

Both hands are crossed with the same moon-white line. The skin along it is raised and toughly smooth, where I stopped the blade of a sword with my grip, rather than have its edge at my throat.

The things that terror makes us do, I think; the things we do to save ourselves.

My left hand has another wound too, newer and pink, welted and softish. Though not as deep, the skin remembers the cut too well to have turned to a scar quite yet.

Both are wounds I gave myself, for one reason or another.

I slip my hands into the water. It’s so cold, I marvel that it’s not frozen, like the Yorgrim that flows off the White River and past Windhelm was. But I’ve resolved at least to wash my face and hands. I can do that much.

In the water I should see my face as it is. Bruise-dark sunken skin round my eyes. Cheeks hollowed and lips gone thin. Instead I can only see my shadow, swimming in the murk. The outline of my tangled hair; my shawl scarfed round my neck; my narrow slouching shoulders.

 

_“You’re a slaver then.”_

_Those are the first words I’ve given him since last night. The only words I can stand to give him. Until now I’ve been too filled up with hating him — ever since the fear and the rage of failing passed and left that useless hate behind. I try to make them drip with venom but they come out flattened and thin. My mouth is dry and my voice is small._

_Amarin grunts a wordless question and turns his head to look at me. “Hm?” His straw coloured hair hangs dirty round his face. His eyes are pink like milk and blood mixed._

_“Not a hunter at all. Was that an act? The deer, the stew…”_

_He lets out another noise. A snort this time. His nostrils flare with a laugh he’s too lazy to open his mouth for. I hate him. I wouldn’t spit on him if he was on fire. I hate him._

_“Nah,” he says, “still a hunter. One with a lick of business sense though. A hind sells for horn, meat, hide, sinew, alchemy in the tongue, eyes, whatever else I’m asked for. Well and good — that’ll feed me a few days and make me enough to get by a while longer. But something like this? Someone like you? Hmph. That’s coin that’ll get me through Winter.”_

_I imagine buzzards pecking at his awful pink eyes. I imagine ripping out his tongue by the root so he can’t lie anymore, to me or to himself. I’m not angry anymore. I’m cold, cold, cold._

_“So nah,” he goes on. “Not a slaver. Just someone who sells to ‘em. Just sometimes, in thin times…”_

_Then he turns round again and pulls me along behind, arms trussed, ankles hobbled together with loose rope and tight knots, so I can only waddle on the end of his leash. He thinks I’m so pathetic he doesn’t need to fear me, even when I’m out of sight, at his back. And I feel sick to think how right he is._

 

Only now do I think: where am I going?

I look to the sky, and over the mountains; I think: that is up, that is East. But where will I go?

Anywhere but home. Those are the terms of my Harrowing. But if my ancestors have been watching, won’t they think – won’t they know – I’ve been Harrowed enough?

But the terms remain. The Harrowing is a matter of time, and not what that time is filled with — learning or suffering, love or hating, or simply waiting out the year. To pass the test you need only come back at the right time and not before.

Yet there are rumours of the ways our forebears were Harrowed. Or what were once rumours and have since become stories. Of khans who were covetous of their heirs, and sent them out to wait through their Harrowings in safety: in the bosom of another cousin-clan; or else with mer who were learned and secluded, at one of the shrines or sites once sacred to our people.

And what ever became of them — the coddled ones? The time would come to be truly tested. Perhaps to pass the Khan’s Ordeal, and succeed their father, so the stories tend to go. They found that where their Harrowing should have made them something – lean, quick, clever; fierce, hard, wise; rich in allies, on one side of the Waiting Door or the other – it had left them a tender kind of nothing, fated to fail. And that’s what it is to be a child among the clans. And that’s what the Harrowing is meant to weed away.

The great ones come back from their Harrowing already so storied it’s like they’ve lived a dozen lives already, even before their childhood’s truly over.

I’ve lived and been lucky enough to go on living. I’m not yet marked as an adult in the eyes of my people, but I have scars now. What did Nanrahamma say about scars?

“Heed the scars of a clansmer well, Little Spark,” I say to myself, echoing her till I can feel her near, though in truth I’m alone by this skinny starveling of a river. “The ones chance and fate – good and bad – have put there. And the ones we put there ourselves. Together they tell our story. Together they’re who we are.”

I stand. And though I don’t know the exact date, I know it’ll get colder soon. I call the wind and ask it which way it’s blowing. From that I know which way to walk. South. I start going South.


	12. Chapter 12

_I’m old enough to know what lovers do – and what parents do to be parents – but I haven’t yet come into myself enough to know why they’d want to. Or why I would want to._

_All the same I know there’s a feeling beginning, somewhere around the edges of the feelings I already have. It’s growing on them. Like a wave that’s been travelling miles at sea, black and almost invisible, when it finally begins to crest, foaming up white — like the sea’s finally showing its teeth, smiling or snarling in sight of the shore._

_I’ve not had as many friends as some other children in the Morayat. I spend too much of my time learning for that, in the yurt with Nanrahamma and Tanet. Breathing Nan’s pipe-smoke and listening. Watching Tanet – who prefers to teach by showing – while she scribes and does things with bones, and ashes, and oils, and balmy waxes. I learn with Noor too – sometimes – though she spends more time alone now since we came to Windhelm._

_But I don’t need a lot of friends. I have one good friend. I don’t remember who said it, but it’s better to have one good knife than a dozen dull and brittle ones, waiting to replace each other when they break. Yennai is my one good knife._

_We are the same age._

_It was Winter when we all came to Windhelm. The river was frozen and we played on it, not knowing how dangerous even thick ice can be — we had never seen it before coming to Skyrim, and we were children. And children fear everything will hurt them, but don’t believe anything can kill them. Even children who’ve seen death already._

_The river’s thawed now and there are birds in the sky again, and boats coming and going, but the water’s still dead-cold. We sprawl with chattering teeth onto the silty shore of the river. When we went in we shrieked like gulls at the cold. Now the same cold’s made us silent, except our panting breaths, piling out of the water._

_Yennai scrambles to her feet and starts to dance on the spot to work away the cold. I just lie on my side, almost-laughing. There is black silt all over both of us. On her it shows up less, except in her silvery hair. On me it looks like smears of darker freckle, starker against my skin._

_“You’re a good swimmer,” she says, and her voice dances fast like the rest of her dances. “I’m just lucky I haven’t drowned yet. Thrashing about like a fish in a basket!”_

_“Nan says our clan’re all good swimmers,” I say, and come to sitting, with my legs hugged up to me. “She says even Ahemmusa who never saw Azura’s Coast – like me – still remember it.”_

_“Mm. But what do you say?”_

_“I—…I don’t know. I think I just got practice — plenty of practice in Blacklight.”_

_In Blacklight, you’d come out of the water salty, and as the water dried, your skin would start to shine. I miss that. The silt is sort of soft but it clings and cloys in a way I don’t like._

_“Mm.” Yennai unfurls the rug-blanket we’ve brought with us. She drapes it over herself then drops down next to me so it hangs over both of us like a tent. “Better,” she sighs._

_I nod, forgetting she can’t see me. It’s dark, and I am warm in this darkness. We’re close. I feel a quiet pride, hot in my cheeks and on my neck, about what she said. “You’re getting better,” I murmur. And I’m proud of that too, and have been since I promised to teach her when the river thawed, and she said she’d like that, and that she’d try to learn._

_This is maybe where that feeling starts. I like this – warm and getting dry – and don’t want the world to get bright and cold again when this stops. The wave starts to crest._

 

I am dreaming. I haven’t stopped since I woke up. These wastes and flats are so empty, it’s easy to fill them with thought. In the same way, if I sang, the song would travel for miles before it got faint. But I’m silent, and I walk, and instead of singing or thinking, I remember so deep it’s like dreaming.

I think of Yennai. My friend, Yennai.

I taught her to swim, and she tried to teach me to dance and wrestle — those were her two talents. Yennai who unlike me always seemed to know what her body was doing and what it would do next. Who knew the lengths and strengths and whereabouts of all her limbs, her hands, her feet. Yennai with her moon-coloured hair.

Yennai whose panting breath I heard in the dark under the rug-blanket. Whose arm I felt against mine, in the dark under that cover. She once fought a mer older than us by half our age again, because of the names he called me. She won that fight while I cowered and keened high in my throat, because Yennai never lost her footing except when she wanted to. Even as a child, it was like she had roots deeper and firmer than the oldest trees — roots as old as a mountain’s roots.

It’s more pleasant to remember this than what came after. I was blurry back then, not knowing much of myself. But when I remember Yennai as she was at that time, when we both had perhaps thirteen or fourteen Summers each, she’s bright and clear.

This is what makes my walking more than just walking, with no purpose other than passing time and heading South. The sky is high and white and empty. Snow is falling properly now, even in daylight, and trying to settle on the ground.

I’ll freeze if I don’t find shelter soon, or don’t make it far enough South soon enough. I’m hungry and have no supplies. I’m cold and still only dressed for Autumn, in my smock stained with blood and dirt; and my breeches and leggings under them; my shawl and my boots.

I dream so as not to think about that. And perhaps that’s unwise.

 

_He is a scribe and his hair is black as inkstone but fine and sleek._

_His father’s shop is a little warren cut into the Grey Quarter’s mid-gorge. It’s in the city-proper, not the Morayat, and like most there it’s just a broader tapering chamber that tails back into a more narrow carving of tunnel. The broad bit is shop, and is mostly sparse, with only a few books and scrolls. But he passes through the curtain that divides shop and narrow tunnel, and beckons me to follow._

_The shop smells of white beanspice, or aged oak, or creamy leather. I love its scent. For all Noor says that a clansmer has no need for books or scrolls, I love to be sent here by Nanrahamma – “no need for books indeed; but we do have need of coin, child; try and deny that!” – to sell recipes and scrolls, spoken out by Nanrahamma who cannot read or write, and scribed by Tanet who can. The books and scrolls here make me thankful that Tanet taught me too._

_“Beautiful…” I let out the word in one long breath, not knowing where to look._

_Here is more paper and more parchment than I’ve ever seen before — stacks and shelves upon stacks upon shelves, like bricks in a wall. And he stands in the midst of it all – sleek, and older than I am, and taller than I will probably ever be – wearing a thin-lipped thing that’s nearly a proud smile._

_“It’s where we store everything we have,” he says, in a way that means he agrees without meaning to gloat. His eyebrows are thin and very dark, like good strokes of a pen, and they smile more for him than his mouth does. They’re smiling for him now._

_“And beyond that?” I nod towards another curtain, still behind him._

_“Why, that’s where we live of course. My father and me. Our home.” He doesn’t say it like others talk about where they live in the Quarter. There’s no bitterness in that word ‘home’. He was born here._

_His name is Senvalis, and he minds the shop when his father’s away doing the things that a House Velothi merchant does all day. The responsibility hangs around him, and makes him seem serious, and older than he is. He is one of the things I like about the shop. I don’t know his scent, so I pretend the rich smooth smell of the shop is his too._

_“Your home,” I repeat the words slowly, then start to speak quick. “Then I’m being rude. I should—…I didn’t do the cleansing before I came in. I—…” Hurrying, I lick the first two fingers of my right hand and touch them to my forehead, my wrists, the middle of my chest. “Should I take off my footwraps?” I stammer out._

_“Tammunei,” he says my name carefully, “relax. We’re not Ashlanders here. There’s no need to be so formal. I’m not expecting a gift or anything. I just thought you might like to see.”_

_“I did — I do. Thank you.”_

_“I can read for you, if you would like?”_

_“Yes,” I say. “Please.”_

_I do not tell him I can read perfectly well for myself. I want to listen to him._

 

Days pass.

These flatlands with their steam-vents and springs – some the good kind, with safe water to drink, warm water to bathe in; others bad, smelling rotten-sweet or sulphurous – are not completely empty. Even as the snow begins to settle, others roam them with me.

Goats canter over the ridges and small crags. Their herds are unlike sheep or guar, who stick together and are strongest that way. These goats go about on their own, and drift in and out of their scattered herd at leisure. Their horns are curly, their coats are shaggy and long, but they’re simple creatures. It took only a little while of listening to their bleating and braying in the distance to work out a calling spell to make them come.

I sing the spell from high up in my head-voice.

I’m not a good butcher, being used to smaller things — fish, rabbits, fowl, mostly. I make a mess of the goat I catch. But I am a clansmer, even if I’m no hunter — the blood, the sinew, the death, didn’t disgust me. I’m not remorseful, like some soft human in a city might be at killing even a chicken for its meat. I am only disappointed at the waste of it: a necessary death, but not used as best it could be.

All the same I have meat to feed me. And I have horn and bone to work with, to make things for trade at the next settled place I come to. I don’t carve or whittle. My use-knife stays sheathed. Instead I scrimshaw like Noor once taught me, the way the wise-womer of the Vereansu make things from bone and horn.

I sit cross-legged in a patch of warmth, where the rocks near a stinking sulphur-spring come together baking hot, warding off the falling snow. The shelter here is invisible but appreciated.

In my hands I hold a curl of horn, wrenched from the skull of the goat that’s fed me these last few days. I run fingers over its ridges and curlicues; I map out the feel and form of it. Then my song begins — a hum in my throat-voice, murmuring along the edges of the horn. And then the horn remembers what it’s like to be alive, and to grow. It begins to grow again, shaped by my intention and my spell.

 

_Yennai went out on Harrowing. She earnt that privilege younger than me. She was always harder, more flexible, more capable. She deserved that right._

_I waited a year. And with the year now up, I’m waiting still. She hasn’t returned — I don’t think she will. I hope with desperate force for her. I hope she found something better. Better than Windhelm – better than snow and stone – better than the frozen Winter river and its rushing white in Spring. Better than me._

_I hope that what she found – or what found her – was too good to leave. And that’s why she’s not come back. Perhaps she will one day. Perhaps I’ll be there to welcome her when she does. When, when, when — a powerful word — I chant it like a charm._

 

Somewhere in the misty South – between the saltmarshes and flats and springs of lower Eastmarch, and where the land the Nords call the Rift truly begins – I find a town.

It’s small but densely packed with people. They call it Vernimwood, but it’s not built of wood like Darkwater Crossing — instead it’s the corpse of a stonebuilt keep, hollowed out for folk to live in. A courtyard where there are chickens; a comb of cellars where waste is thrown and pigs are kept. And battlements; a thickset gatehouse; and a stout stump of tower that sits looking out over the road.

It’s crowded. It reminds me of an anthill. People try to keep inside the walls. Outside are only a few scrubby plots of land where the townsfolk try to grow turnips and potatoes — but this is true Winter now, at its height, and so those plots grow nothing but dirt and frost. The people stay inside their walls and shiver.

I pay for a space in their bunkhouse. It’s cramped and smells of stale sweat and rotting mortar – sick stone – but there is a fire, and it’s warm. The scent of smoke has always felt like home.

 

_“I understand – I’m sorry, I’m sorry – I didn’t know – I assumed—…But it’s because I’m—…I’m sorry.”_

_I feel sick. I talk and talk and can’t stop talking. And I feel sick. Like the lurch that catches you straight in the gut when you start to fall, in jumping, cliff-diving, or in a bad dream. It’s like I’m falling and I can’t stop._

_“It’s nothing to do with what parts you have,” Senvalis says. He is so calm – I don’t know how he manages it – so calm it feels like cruelty. “Or what parts I have by comparison. It’s not because you’re ahmeri.”_

_Cliff-diving then. I’m not falling anymore. I’ve hit the surface of the water and now it’s over my head. I can’t breathe. I can’t get breath to talk back now. Surrounded by books and scrolls, in the shop’s backroom, I feel like I’m submerged in cold water._

_“Because you’re not,” he continues, “are you? You’re—…you’re not anything. Not womer, not ahmer — you don’t even know yourself. Who you are, what you are.”_

_I hug my arms around myself, like I’ve seen Tanet do. It makes her look strong, but only proves to me I’m weak, and small, and nothing at all. I close my eyes — it stops the tears coming for now._

_“You don’t—…it’s like you don’t love yourself enough to be anything, live as anything, so you just stay this way. Nemer. I don’t…I don’t know how to love that, Tam. I don’t know if I can.”_

_That word. He says it, poisonous with pity. Nemer. Nothing – animal – half-thing – creature. Stripped or empty of identity. It’s the word Yennai fought to defend me from. And now he’s turned it on me. I asked him to kiss me. I wanted so badly for him to kiss me._


	13. Chapter 13

_Dragged cross-country, wrists tied and scabbed over now, I tell myself over and over:_

_I don’t need hands to hurt someone I hate. I don’t need a blade or a spear. Inside myself, I’ve got all I need – stored up and shored up inside of myself – to harm and heal, to give and to take. This was Azura’s gift to the Velothi — dawn and dusk; what lasts on grey between them; the Waiting Door. I carry it like my teachers carry it — like theirs did before them._

_And I hate him with all the weight of a lifetime, even after three days that seem longer now than they should’ve been. I feed that hate to the gift in me till it’s a kind of power. It rises and rises, and becomes enough to hope on – hope through; heavy and potent – brewed and steeped and strong. And this is why I’m not yet beaten._

_This is the moment I’ve chosen as mine. I let it go. All of it. Maybe I scream, or think I do. Because it hurts, raw like an old wound opening. The wild magic surges and sears from me, and over him now, in a wave of whispering. It hurts me enough that I feel safe for a moment, secure in knowing it’ll hurt him more._

_He winces. In sudden pain he lets out a hiss. For a moment it’s glorious._

_But he’s quick as a snake. He must have turned through the hurt, because now his hand’s round my throat. And he’s stronger than I am, and always was. He used the rope to yank me to the ground – he kicked me – so fast I remember it’s happened before I know it’s happening._

_I can’t breathe. His hands are rough and gripping tight. A many-coloured blackness blooms before my eyes. The world goes dark._

 

I wake from dreams of Amarin. I remember him fully these days, even if I don’t want to, and try not to. But I also remember where I am now — when the gut-strong urge to sob swells as I come to, I stifle it into dry silence.

The bunkhouse in Vernimwood sleeps safe, dark, and stale-smelling around me. Like a badger’s set or a rabbit’s burrow — this buried feeling comforts the locals but makes me uneasy. Tanet always told me you shouldn’t take a clansmer out from under the sky; not while there’s life in them yet. And I’m still living, by luck, or skill, or the love of those who came before. So I seek out the sky.

I sleep with everything I own close by me. I sleep fully clothed, with my smock wrapped round me, as I curl like a sea-shell in my cot, sling-sack hoarded against my belly. When I rise there’s no need to dress. I get up and find my way out of the dark.

Vernimwood is not fully awake yet. The corridors and the narrow stone streets are mostly empty. The pre-dawn light is silver but the snow that fell overnight is already grey. The sentry at her post knows me by now, and barely needs to stir from her nap to let me through the little door in the town’s one big gate.

Outside is more open, more welcome, and cold. The wind murmurs slow mixed messages, through the trunks of the trees — pines still thick with snow-heaped fronds; bare-branched oaks and birches. And I walk slowly, so I can listen better.

I listen for the small voices of rabbits, the passage of wild-fowl, or the simmering sound of the thousand-thousand things that gather to dismantle a stag when it falls — that’s the way to hear dead bones and horns by listening out for life. I don’t think of it as hunting so much as gathering. Often what I’m looking for needs finding rather than killing. And that first word has a bad taste about it…

 

_It’s the word he orders his lies around. He tells himself the same lies he told me, and keeps telling me, and keeps telling me when he talks to me at all. He’s a hunter, he says. But why does a hunter need a sword? And why would a hunter have the things he’s used to bind me?_

_They look like manacles. But clapped shut round my wrists they feel wrong, and colder than they should, and more numb than they should._

_“A little treasure from the Dres,” Amarin says over me. “Feel that you little worm? There’s magic in them. Something to shackle more than just your hands, hey? So we’ll have no more magic from you. No more trouble, d’you hear?”_

_The manacles gnaw toothlessly at me like leeches, and resonate with magic designed to bleed other magic dry. I am empty. No power, no purpose, just chattel — useless and hopeless. My throat is raw. My neck is bruised where he choked me. I can’t make myself look him in the eyes, but fallen on my side with my hands shackled at my back, I can’t turn away._

_He coughs. His eyes are bloodshot and his face is drawn. Amarin’s sneer twists and becomes a grimace. As he starts to cough, I find the courage to look, then stare. They’re wet and hacking, ragged sounds. The muscles knot and cord in his neck, and he doubles up, bent over himself._

_I dare. I wish. I dare. But wishing won’t make him dead._

_Amarin straightens, wheezing and hissing. He spits thick and red, then sets about building a fire for the night._

_It’s not victory, to see him cough and bleed like that, but it’s something — an ember of courage, still burning in me. I hold it close and secret, knowing it’s all I have left._

 

My feet sink as I walk in the woods every morning. I am gathering. The snow comes white and frozen up almost to my knees in places. Any small herbs or useful plants are buried now, under all the weight of Winter.

I think: if Amarin had caught me now instead of then, only a couple of months later, I couldn’t have done what I did. By now I’d be sold. Or worse, I’d still be his.

 

_Things have their magic, same as people. That’s what Nanrahamma said. It’s a heartbeat you can hear if you only listen right, and a sap to tap into, if you only know how. All of it’s magic, waiting to happen — magic that lives outside ourselves._

_“A wise-womer knows how to take this and that,” she might say, “and make them talk to each other. Tell each other, ‘wake up now, it’s time to stop waiting!’ That’s what alchemy is, Little Spark. All it is, really.”_

_I bear that in mind, after Amarin shackles me. As he leads me across the hinterland between Holds, eastward, I tell myself it doesn’t matter that he’s emptied me, because the world’s still full._

_I plan. I collect. I keep my eyes sharp for roots and spores, and gather them up when his eyes aren’t on me. I fake a misstep, and stumble to catch at dry struts of milkgrass, or wrench at canisroot, bought from the ground in return for bruises. I writhe and twist while Amarin sleeps, to mouth the wettish skin off impstools in caves and ruins. And I hoard them up. I chew them and hide them behind my teeth till my silence is almost a weapon._

_But the landscape is changing as we get further East. Mountains loom in the distance. I don’t recognise the plants like I did before. So it must be soon, mustn’t it?_

_I’m not angry anymore. I don’t hope. I’m committed, and careful, knowing it must happen. And I wonder: is this what Nanrahamma always meant when she talked about wisdom? Not knowing what can be done, or how it might be done, but knowing what must be done, no matter how._

_Today the mountains are close and the sky is grey beyond them. Amarin says that Morrowind waits on the other side – and he says they still buy slaves there, so that’s where he’ll sell me – but I hardly hear him over the din of my calm. I just think: soon._

 

I find a safe place. The flat trunk-table of a chopped down tree squats in the snow here. Somewhere overhead, the sun has risen, and driven the morning fog away. The cold stays though, and I brush inches of snow from the stump before sitting down.

Like this, my smock’s skirts spread between my knees and make a kind of apron. I rummage and search out my purse, and pour its contents into the valley of fabric. Frowning, I look over my shoulder; frowning, I bite my tongue — I try to make sense of the coins, and try to make sure I’m alone.

My palms sweat and my eyes ache. My brain takes the coins and their numbers and kinds into itself, and churns awkwardly, as if digesting something difficult. Then it stops. I blink, staring down only at metal, not money — the coins have no meaning and the numbers are lost. Gritting my teeth, I try again…

Copper rounds, stamped with dragons; seven of them heaped up, more identical than the rest. Irregular bits of copper, etched with Nord runes; I struggle to count and keep their worths in mind; nearly twenty of them. Eight squares of dark hardwood, runed the same way. One piece of grubby silver I know is a shilling.

I breathe out. My cheeks are flushed with relief. The sun is much higher by the time I’m done. I look at the coins. I’ve forgotten the exact numbers again, but I was searching for a meaning, and that remains.

I’ll only be able to rent my cot a little longer. Until now I was gathering things to craft and sell in Vernimwood – charms against rockjoint, the dry-cough, mildpox, mostly – but lately I’ve been searching for specific things and keeping them for myself. Gathering and crafting to a purpose has made me poor — even I can tell that.

 

_And now the sky is black. And over us are spread a swarm of stars. The night is bright, but hunger fogs my mind. I’ve refused food to keep the gummy cud of secret courage safe behind my teeth. Amarin tried and failed to make me eat — that was a small victory too._

_He sets into his routine. Lighting a fire – taking off his tall worn soft leather boots – unsheathing his sword and setting it down on the ground, with the point subtle-angled towards me. He puffs mist into his hands. The night is cold despite the stars and moon. Hard the ground, bleak the air._

_And I just think: milkgrass, canisroot, semanode, shanti, impstool. Weak with hunger, I think: bone marrow — that’s all that remains. The chewed-through jelly of them all, grim and hidden in my cheek, has a bitter taste I’ve gotten used to. For days I’ve been cautious, quiet, and obedient._

_The fire is roaring now, but the shackles have drained me, and I hear only the dumb noise of wood and peat, shuddering as it burns. Still, I feel almost like laughing. Amarin roasts a chunk of goat over the flames. My stomach coils and stirs — I watch fat drip from the meat, and smell it as it cooks. Disgust and longing twine in my gut._

_He eats and talks between mouthfuls. “Gonna have to feed yourself soon, hey? The Dres don’t buy bones ‘less there’s meat on them too.” He holds out a gnawed piece of shank, mostly gristle, sinew, strings of meat and a hunk of bone. “Watcha say, worm? Wanna bite?”_

_He calls me a worm. I writhe from where I’ve collapsed, over toward the fire. Straining, I heave myself upright with my bruised elbows. I open my mouth and he lifts the shank to my lips. I am grinning just before I bite._

_The taste of blood comes first. Then flesh, then bone. Amarin recoils, howling more in rage than pain. I am grinning and my mouth is wide and red. It must be now. I spit red and viscous into the fire between us. It sparks up, shuddering and spitting. Then Amarin hits me. Clutching his left hand with his right, he kicks me in the side of the head, but his feet are bare and he teeters, hissing Nord curses, hurting himself. He can hurt me all he likes now — now, now, now._

_The smoke from the fire is thick and clay red. I curl in on myself, staying close to the ground. I inured myself while I chewed and worked the alchemy: I can breathe it a little but no more. Amarin heaves lungfuls between howls of rage, and kicks, and blows I suffer because I know I must._

_I shut my stinging eyes to keep out the smoke. Amarin is coughing again now, wetter than before. The blows let off. I hear him slump. Time is broken around me and blurred. I can only hear his breath as it frays into tatters. But it doesn’t stop. It’s the only sound now — the fire’s burnt out — his struggling’s turned to silence and stillness._

_Blind behind closed eyes, I begin to move. I curl myself tighter, legs bunched up, arms stretched down. I hurt too much to notice the new pain of it, but my wrists wrench over my feet, and jar out in front of me now. And I open my eyes._

_The smoke’s cleared. We’re lit up only by embers as I struggle to stand. Amarin is a wretched heap by the fire, still as a fallen statue, reaching for his sword. I make myself look at him like I’ve been too afraid to do for days. He is withered in his hunter’s clothes. His outstretched arm is thin as a willow branch — the muscle wastes and the bone twists as I watch. He holds his maimed left hand close to his chest._

_His face is a mask of mad pain. Only his eyes move. They stare at me so hard and wide I can’t tell what they hold. Hate or fear or only animal surprise, like a rabbit caught in a snare. It’s the same snare he used to catch me. Poison._

_I turn him over and search till I find his keys. I work them into the lock on these shackles. The iron shucks off and falls to the ground._

_And suddenly I’m drenched with starlight. I am flooded. Violently filled with the greatest peace I’ve ever known. What he took from me begins to trickle back, like whispers on the breeze._


	14. Chapter 14

_Vernimwood is miles away. Miles made longer by thick forest, thick snow, packed tight and frozen hard. With no money to pay the matron of the bunkhouse, I walk in search of other ways to last out the Winter._

_This is not walking but wading. My legs burn, and the struggle grows with every step. The chill in the air is deep and harsh._

_I have on my under-shift and work-smock. Over that my shawl, scarfed round my neck. Over that a new thing of fleece-lined sheepskin – like a broad diamond of blanket, with a hole in the middle for my head, so it drapes down my front and back, and over my narrow shoulders – traded for in Vernimwood, with a shepherd stranded there over Winter, skinning and selling his flock to get by._

_And still I’m cold. Through my skin and through to my bones, I am cold. Colder still when night starts its inward glide, and the sky through the bare-armed trees gets dark. Merciless snowfall starts again. And I am numb and growing stupid for cold, when I find the thunderstruck tree._

_It’s black and enormous, lost in the wild, but found once by a storm. It looks now like a single great dark neck, stemming up from the untouched snow, then splitting into two sprays of cindery branches — I look at them and think of antlers. I look at its trunk and see it’s riven open._

_Shivering, I struggle inside. The space is tight and smells of must and charcoal. Its blackness smears onto my smock and the new fleece-lined over-thing. This is what I needed._

_I take a deep breath and hold it till my heart is slow. The exhale is a humming sigh. I take a deeper breath. It lasts me longer still. The outward sigh is a slow song, getting slower, steadier. I think of things that live under the ground. I think of how they survive the Winter. Slow the song and slower now, until I no longer need to sing it. The magic of it begins to work._

_This dead tree is my chrysalis. I slip into dreams, and dream that I am warm._

…

“He’s broken. No good as a scrapper anymore, and sure as Spring no good for hunting. And you don’t seem the type to be wanting a lap-dog. So it makes a man wonder — what’s a little thing like you want him for?”

This man smiles a lot for someone so cruel. He talks a lot too, and quickly, but says almost nothing. He sits in a wicker resting-chair, in a half-cleared section of forest, and all around him are cages, filled with songs I’d rather not hear. But I’ve heard them once and now can’t stop. Desperation, loathing, longing; mad and fearful aggression; and worst of all the aching silence of animals waiting to die.

“I want him for my own reasons,” I say. “And you don’t. It should be simple. Why isn’t it?”

The cages hold creatures he caught in the forest, or bought from others who caught them for him — he shows them off; he makes them fight till they can’t anymore. He has spur-heeled wing-clipped birds, and weasels, badgers, stoats. But his pride is pinned on the wolves – the wildest and fiercest of his fighters – whose fights bring him the best money. That’s why he makes them suffer longest.

“Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t one to turn away a buyer!” He combs his greasy beard with his fingers while he speaks. His voice is lukewarm, oozing. “He’s old – white round the chops – milky in the eyes. And that leg of his ain’t getting better — not ever. But we’ve been through some times, you see? Good and bad — together. And when he was young – oh! – a true champion of the pits, he was. So you see, I’d hate to see him go without adding a certain…sentimental value to the sale price, if you follow?”

His Tamrielic is hard for me, but I know he’s lying, trying to sell something worthless to him, seeing it still holds merit for me. Have I shown him too much compassion already?

I look over at one cage among the others. Inside is the one we’re talking about: an old wolf the colour of brushwood, but lustreless now. Its fur is mottled with grey, and white, and missing in places. Its gums are raw and drawn back from its yellow teeth. One front leg is awkwardly angled, held close to its body in a cage that was too small, even before this wolf came into its full growth.

From it comes the deepest silence of them all: a numb and agonised muteness. He’s seen it all but killed too many times — still he’s yet to let it die. I hear this, because I’ve been listening.

…

_Birdsong. The first thing I hear is birdsong. The world dilates from the song outwards. I come awake gradually. I slip into dreams, and out of dreams, and don’t know whether they last moments or days._

_— Nanrahamma has never looked so young. Not to me. Her hair’s still bone-white, and still she chacks and clicks and clatters with the sound of bracelets and trinkets, beads and charms. But her face is unlined except with her marks. She is sweating and panicked, pained and drawn. She says over and over, like a mantra: “It is coming to an end.” And I hold her and mop her brow. But I am not myself. And the eyes I see through are not my own. —_

_— My arms are not my own. They hold a mer whose hair is the colour of charcoal and whose face marks him as a warrior. Somewhere the wind is howling. Life is leaving him, but in too slow a way to be called merciful. My eyes are not my own. They start to blur and sting with salt. —_

_— I look across a plain and see that it is dying. It is a place I have only seen in dreams. — I see lands pass before me. Plains and valleys. The basin of a river and the sea’s wide open mouth. A narrow pass. — I am swallowed by pain. The pain is both familiar and one I have never felt before. I give birth to a child. Slick and shining, small and thin, with three thick wet locks of hair on his head, the colour of new-spilt blood. Mine. My third child. —_

_Birdsong. I wake and for a moment part of me cracks and a scream forms in my throat. — Where is my child? Why am I not holding my child? — And then I am myself again. I am in my own body, and when I see the world, it’s through my own eyes, from inside the newly warm shade of the thunderstruck tree._

_I am hungry. Weeks of hunger fight and bite and devour each other inside me. I am not dreaming now, but still I move like a sleepwalker. I lurch from the tree. I smell all of Spring in the warmish air. I chase. I eat._

…

I’ve been holding my purse, tight in my hand all this time. Like a talisman against my scarred palm, to see me through talking to this man. I lift it to let him see, then tip out the remaining few coins into my hand. The metal is warm from my grip.

“Here,” I say, and stretch out my hand towards him. “This is all I have.”

He rakes through his beard again, and eyes the coins. “Aye,” he says slowly, and I wonder if he’s disappointed. “Can see you’re not one for bargaining…Aye, that’d about cover my sentiment…”

I let myself look down at the coins now, while he fingers the ring of keys at his belt. I count one silver and a scant few coppers, in odd shapes and uniform sizes, before he snatches them away from me.

Together we walk to one cage among the many. We look at the same wolf, and see different things. He sees the things my coins will buy him, I think. I see the wolf’s empty eyes, sad and blank but shining like new-fallen chestnuts.

…

_Back in the trunk of the thunderstruck tree, I kneel, spine straight, and try to hear. This is not like listening for the whispers from beyond the Waiting Door. It doesn’t come so easily. The spell I weave to listen through is a hard one, and holding it is like trying to fully think too many thoughts at once._

_The listening is a slow drain on me as I stretch my power through the forest. Through the roots of the trees as they wake and find their thirst again, fed with meltwater. Through the flight of every bird. My pulse is slow but steady, and through it I try to hear the whole forest, until I think I’m going mad._

_But finally I hear longing. I hear waiting. Through the thickets and the melt-sodden ground, I hear something that wants to be heard. It’s hurt. Its life is a halting thing, like the walk of something wounded. It will fit._

_We’ve been waiting for each other._

…

I don’t know the tongues of beasts — only wordless songs that call them, or calm them. But I try to speak with my gaze, into the creature’s own dark nut-brown eyes: you brought me here; I’m sorry you had to wait so long; it won’t be much longer now.

Something glints in the wolf’s eyes. Not understanding, but anticipation perhaps — a newer, sharper kind of waiting. Not much longer now.

“Can you leash him for me?” I ask. “And close his mouth? Please.” I try to sound less than my age now, all naivety and awe.

“Close his mouth? Muzzle him, you mean?”

“Yes. Thank you. I didn’t know the word – and don’t want him to bite me – but you tamed him – and all of the others. If you told him not to bite then maybe he wouldn’t.”

Fake admiration stains my voice. The man smiles — I’ve flattered him.

“Relax, lass. I can muzzle him for you, if that’s what you want. Till he’s used to you, like.”

I smile without showing my teeth, and dip my head to him in a small bow. I watch. I am uneasy – my heart races – but I hope he only sees it as excitement or admiration. This is a show for him too.

Like speaking a spell, he snaps one word, and the wolf cowers. He’s beaten it maybe, saying that word between blows, so the word alone is like beating now. There is anger on the edges of my anxiousness.

He reaches to the ring of keys at his wide girdle and fits one to the lock. His back is turned to me now. He opens the cage door, and reaches a wiry arm inside. His other hand holds a leather-thonged leash, ending in a kind of studded net. He hides that hand behind him as he combs his fingers through the wolf’s patchy mane, then grabs the scruff of its neck.

The wolf gives a high pained moan.

I seize the man’s wrist in both hands, so tight between my fingers my knuckles burn pale. I twist it up behind his back and push him down. The man makes no sound, but I feel his shock through the pulse in his wrist, where my thumb presses hard and insistent. I grit my teeth, not letting go, and mutter through them a low whispering spell in my heart-voice.

This is the voice I use to sing to skin, and bone, and blood, to move them. It resonates from inside my chest and rings through his veins to sound in his ribcage. The song finds his heart — it dances, lurching against its rhythms as I hold him close. The spell is cruel but quick. A choking sound comes from his throat. His expression screws tight and falls lax — the whole of his body follows.

I let him go. He looks almost like he’s sleeping now — I don’t know when he’ll wake up. And I wonder: would death have been kinder than this?

…

_Amarin tries to scream as I reach down and fold my hand round the grip of his sword. The sound is only a gurgle, risen from the sunken loose flesh of his neck. I saw through the rope round my ankles. I raise the sword in both hands. The gurgle becomes a groaning._

_I swing the blade shrieking down in sparks and scraping metal against the stones he shored up about his fire. I bring the sword down, and down, and down again. I rage through my weakness as the blade chips, then bends, and spits splinters like a beaten brawler losing teeth. Then I fling it to the ground by him._

_I leave the sword as wasted as my poison left Amarin. Crooked, twisted, useless — not quite broken, but unable to hurt anymore. I take the coin he carries. I cannot bear to take anything else that might speak to me of him. I want to forget him._

_I do not leave him any words — I stay silent as a sky getting ready to storm._

_I am not sorry – so I tell myself – but I wonder: would death have been kinder than this?_

…

I know how kind death can be. At least, I’ve always been told. Nanrahamma has taught me by rote: “The Waiting Door is the final kindness we show to the ones we can’t heal.” Tanet has taught me it need not be an ending, and the whispers of those who came before are testament to that.

It’s what I tell myself now, while the wolf limps along beside me, following me blind and loyal through the woods. Whether it follows me as its rescuer or its new master, I can’t tell.

Between trunks I see the clearing, and the sudden black antlers that crown the thunderstruck tree. We approach.

I cut down a hare, hung from the tree’s lowermost arms, and feed it to the wolf. It eats automatically — the bearded man who made it fight buried its wild spirit long ago, beneath obedience, and silence. It cannot run; it cannot hunt.

My chest is tight and my tongue feels swollen, as if I’m about to cry. I crouch on my haunches and rip my eyes away from watching the wolf’s meekness. Instead I look down at the thing in my left hand — the thing I’ve been working on since Mid-Winter in Vernimwood.

A shard of flint is tangled at its heart, in a cage of deadwood and antler, wolf-teeth and bone, all twisted with song into shape. Thin clumsy braids of my hair are straggled and webbed bright red throughout. Here I’ve poured all the fear I found by remembering Amarin. I worked it into something fierce and resolved. Tanet called such things ghost-traps, and had plenty. But it was Noor who taught me this magic, not her.

It’s small enough to fit in my closed hand. And it’s why no-one will hurt me like Amarin did — never again — never.

I try to make the wolf’s passing kind, but the way it trusts me makes me want to weep for it. Instead I sing. My throat-voice flows like moonlight, into the wolf’s sad and wounded body – through the layers of silence; through the broken obedience – until it finds and twines around its wild buried soul. And it pulls. Out of what the man did to its flesh and into the ghost-trap’s flinty core.

“I’m sorry,” I say in Dunmeris, hunched over the ghost-trap I’ve made.

I tried to be kind. A snakelike coldness curls in my belly, making it hard to tell myself this was a mercy. But I know there is one part left in the ritual. I must name it, so it knows the sound that’ll call it back from beyond its rest. And as I fed its body, I must also feed its spirit. I nick my forearm with my use-knife. The blood wells, drips onto the flint, and is swallowed.

“By blood I thank you, and by blood I name you. Josket. By that name you shall know yourself, and by that name be known to all my line. For we are sivami now – bound – and by that bond I swear to keep you well. Josket.”


	15. Chapter 15

I passed the year’s turning in darkness. Left to rot in a root cellar rather than be judged, I was buried somewhere under Darkwater Crossing, and so the New Year passed me by in silence. I couldn’t tell – and can’t tell now – just when the turn took place. Those days are black and shapeless.

In the hollowed out trunk of the thunderstruck tree, I slept through and survived whatever remained of Winter. It was somewhere in the tangled woods that fir the hinterlands between Eastmarch and The Rift. I could find it again if pressed, but could never direct anyone else to it, or draw a map. Those woods are shapeless too.

In recent nights, I also dream of shapeless things. Feathers and shifting skins that stretch and roil like clouds; pelts that billow like pine trees in the breeze; teeth and bones, ranging, rearranging.

These aren’t like the dreams of places I’ve never been, seen through eyes that are not my own — the dreams I inherit from the Ghostline. Those are memories of those who came before, passed on to me in dreams — I have them for the same natural powerful reasons I have my mother’s slanting eyes – auburn-coloured, shaped like apricot stones – or her father’s blazing hair. At least, so I’ve always been told…

These dreams are closer and current. They take place in the world around me while I sleep. I sleep in a grove by a brook, under a shelf of stone; the shapes form, unform, and reform over the water, tasting it, seeing themselves reflected in it. I sleep on the brow of a hill, in the shade of a single standing stone; the dreams are set above me in the night-sky’s open mouth, wheeling round the axis of the same carved tusk I rest against.

I think I know what these dreams are. They’re Josket, bound to me and to all the ghosts that live and echo in me. They’re Josket coming to know itself — perhaps teaching me of itself as it learns.

I know that it’s not what it was; the nameless wolf-that-was is not Josket; it died so Josket could be born. And Josket is not its soul, but a spirit that happened when I freed that spirit by binding it. Josket is not the ghost of a wolf, but still finds it easiest to be something like a wolf — that’s how I see it in these dreams, when I see it clearest. The memory of the shape of a wolf, shapeless but filling out a shape familiar to it.

It’s difficult to explain to myself. I know the word for it all – sivami – but don’t know exactly what it is or what it means — whether Josket is a sivami; or whether we, together, are sivami; or whether the bond itself is sivami; or all those things and more. Nanrahamma, and Tanet, and Noor taught me only so much — just the word. Tanet had spirits in her service, bound to her ghost-traps, but they were more like tools than living changing things. She never had this, whatever this is.

…

_See. We climb the cliffs before dawn._

_Where the mer who run the cargo-lifts for the high-up bits of Blacklight have stuck balconies and skeletons of scaffolding and mechanisms into the weird-regular column-formed cliffs that make up part of our coast. Where the tall platforms jut empty, with no silt-striders to dock at them anymore. Where the sentries do their seeing from now._

_We come up from the Tide District; through the docksides; up through the streets of the Pickers’ Bank. We come past the open emptiness that would hold the beginnings of a market on any other day; up through the Hung Gardens, quiet and twilit in the grey that comes before sunrise; and we climb through the riggings and scaffolds of the cliffs._

_I’m scared, knowing my arms and legs and hands and feet don’t always know what’s best for me, or what they’re meant to be doing. I’m scared, knowing I could fall. And the fear grows the higher we go. I think I tell it to them — to those sort-of-friends whose faces I can’t recall. And they laugh and keep on climbing._

_But eventually it’s just me, climbing as they fall back and stop to breathe — I keep climbing so I don’t have to look down. I think of coast-racers who’d fall if they didn’t keep flying._

_Eventually I’m atop the cliffs – panting and drenched in sweat – and the dawn comes, creeping in from the East, over the sea, towards me. I’ve seen it before, but never so much of it, never from such a height. And I’m overcome. I shout down to the ones who’ve stopped, stranded for now on the shadowed side of the cliffs:_

_“Gold! The sea’s turned to gold!”_

…

So this is what the Nords call The Rift. To me it’s nothing sudden — only what happens when the trees start to thin and the forest gets sparse and grows tame. Still, I struggle through brambles and thickets, wishing I knew spells to make them part for me. I muddle uphill, across slopes of scree and jagged rock, twisted round with tree-roots, and the journey is more climbing than walking. But eventually the land flattens.

It’s a gradual change, but everything shades and changes, and now everything looks like Autumn. Golden leaves, new and small as coins, on trees with bark the colour of silver, curled like paper. High thick rusty grasses, and seams of sepia clay. Crawling patches of vines, with small gnarly gourds nestled amongst them, skins hard as iron, but bright orange and good to eat inside. Meadows and coppices. Then broad swathes of steppe: flatland, filled with nothing but memories that are not mine, and link to places that are not this place.

In time I come upon a village, and a petty patchwork of farmland. It jars at me. My solitude slips away, and suddenly the world’s not mine anymore. Alone, things are what you make of them, and I am what I do and think, and nothing else. And alone, what I do and think is mine. But here, there’s not an inch of land that doesn’t belong to someone else; and here I have to readjust to having the eyes of others on me, creating me with their gaze and their thoughts, leaving me less space to create and go on creating myself.

The wilds were harsh and often cruel. But I miss being able to bathe in any pond or spring, or under any waterfall I found. I miss not thinking, for days and days, what I looked like, because there was no-one to see me.

I build a fire of deadwood and bake a gourd in the embers. But before I can crack it open and scoop out the steaming flesh from its hard scorched skin, I hear voices, see torches and lanterns. Nords with farmtools come, shouting that I’m trespassing on their land. I snatch up the hot gourd and run off into the night, to lose myself in spindly orchards, and lose the Nords in their own pastures.

I find a road and follow it.

Josket has come out of my dreams by now, and I feel it invisible near me sometimes, in the eddies of dust the wind kicks up as I walk. Sometimes I hear paws, tracking along beside me. And I think: I’m safe, at least.

…

_See. Where Amarin shuddered and writhed and tried to hurt me, even after I ruined him, the man with the banks of cages and the greasy beard and the tongue that wets his lips too often is still and stiff._

_He lies on his side, noiseless, and I look down at his face. Half of it is slack and wrong somehow. I know I did that, but hardly know what it is I’ve done._

_My anger ebbs and turns to pity. The animals in the cages cry out now — no-one will silence them. I breathe deeply and try to become cold and careful._

_I take back the coins I gave him, but leave the ring on his finger, the shoes on his feet. I leave what remained in his purse. I take his keys and begin to unlock the cages. But there are too many keys, and too many cages, and my hands start to shake. I can’t stay to open them all._

_I turn to go. Squawking, crowing, howling — behind me come echoes from the cages that stayed locked. They echo on, long after they’re out of earshot._

…

I’ve not seen a market in months – not like this – not since Windhelm. And now it rages round me, washing me with the same mixed terror and fascination markets have always done their best to drown me in.

I love the things for sale.

Baskets filled with the same cabbages I saw in the patchwork fields that led me here, in forest green and marled marbled purple and white. Golden-brown earthenware; bowls, cups, cook-pots; turned up from the clay-country I travelled through, days back; fired in the squat cairn-like kilns that I saw, sat and smoking amidst the fields. Good soft wool.

But most of all, iron, pewter, copper — I should have known by the rust-coloured riverbeds, the reddish soil, the smell of burning hair or the bad-oyster-taste on the wind: this is ore-country, not clay any longer…Somewhere, something changed.

But the press of bodies and the chaos of voices, the dozens upon dozens of eyes grazing across me and then glancing away — all of that chafes at me till I feel raw. The market rushes and crashes against me. And I think I half-remember a story Nanrahamma used to tell me, about a whirlpool with a womer’s name—…I think of the whirlpool, and it sucks me under.

I come away. I find somewhere and tell myself: it’s alright, it’s quiet now. I’m alone — just feeling that is a balm on my mind’s frayed edges. But my purse is screamingly empty and all the coins inside have turned into things I caved and bought, desperate, trying to buy a way out and away.

I crouch in the silent place I’ve found, in an alley overhung by the meeting roofs of two stocky cabins. Breathing deeply, listening to the quiet and knowing how distant the market is, I try to tell myself: it’s alright, they’re beautiful things. I look them over, turning them in my hands.

There is a green-black teapot of bronze, with a pattern around its broad pot-belly like a kagouti’s crest-scales, or the blade-like petals of an artichoke flower. A little gap-toothed comb, made from whale-bone or horker-bone or tusk, and carved like an arch with an eye where its keystone might be. And a small bauble of glass with a short thin stem like a hummingbird’s beak, filled with golden nectar.

I unstopper the stem and sniff the stuff inside — it smells like the colour of amber, and glares out in song just behind my eyeballs. It’s scented oil, I think, though I don’t know what it’s scented with.

It’s alright – I believe it now – they’re beautiful. Things I would’ve wanted if I’d only let myself want them. My breath has been quick and scarce and sharp for so long. Finally, it hitches and changes, to become steady and whole again.

The clansmer in me is amazed at how a town like this can grow up from just a hole in the ground. Once there was only a seam of iron here, but it hid a black glittering kernel of ebony at its heart: a precious thing that seems stolen-wrong to me, to have taken root here, outside of my homeland. So then came the mine. And the town, watered by a river of coin.

A wide road runs down the town’s middle, leading to the pit where the smelting ditches belch, and the foundries smolder, and the entrance holes to the mine seep a haze of reddish smoke. The main road through The Rift’s ore-country crosses that road. Inns and a market spring from their meeting. But I keep to the town’s edge, where balding common ground melts into the sparse surrounding land, and the miners live near herds of half-wild pigs, kept to see them through Winter.

I stop a skinny shaggy-haired human child, wrapped about in a thick woollen shawl. His pale skin is smudged with the same tinge I smell on the air. I ask:

“Please — what’s the name of this town?”

“Red-Belly Mine,” he says. Then he remembers – because he is old enough to know by now – that he’s meant to gawk, and stare at my eyes, my ashen skin, my ears. “But folk call the stuff round it Shor’s Stone.”

I think a sorry look comes across me as he nestles into his shawl and begins to hurry away. Shor’s Stone, I think to myself with moving lips, as the sky begins to tighten, and my bones tell me rain is on its way.


	16. Chapter 16

It hurts but in a small way. Hissing through gritted teeth, I draw the whalebone comb through my hair. Every tangle catches, tugs, then gives with a lurch of satisfaction. Even with my free hand holding tight to the roots of my hair, it hurts — but this is a safe hurt, familiar and soothing, and long overdue.

The steam has stopped rising but the water’s still yet to go cold. This copper tub – with its pale green patina to mark the tides of every bath it’s been used for – is all the world to me, and I’d give all the world just to stay in it, if the water would only stay warm.

It’s been so long since I bathed myself fully; all of me at once and not just part by part, in rivers and ponds and springs. Not since Windhelm, I think. The sight and sense of my nakedness has gotten unfamiliar, just as my hair’s grown longer and wilder, tying itself into knots. I’m shy with myself as I sink under the surface of the water and let its thick submerged sort-of-sound overgulf me.

Half my Harrowing has come and gone. Autumn, Winter, the coming Spring and the Spring that’s now come. This month is Rain’s Hand, by the Imperial Calendar: the seventh since I left Windhelm.

I let myself finish the thought, then come up into the air again. Hauling in a breath, I push my long hair back from my face, and rub at my eyes, and go under once more.

These months since I crossed the Autumn ice have passed slow as the seasons themselves, being so full of things. Suffering, travelling; starving, feeding. But I turn and look at them with memory’s eyes and see, suddenly, they’ve gone by in an onrush of instants. Time is a tricky thing — not solid and stable, like counting up pebbles, and not even like trickling sand. Time is like water: it fills what holds it, whether memory or moments, and moves only to currents all its own.

Again, I surface. The water’s gotten cold. I step gingerly out and dry myself off.

…

_I added blisters to the scars on my palms, working behind a plough for three days. That was long enough to learn that Shor’s Stone is not just the mine, the crossroads, the market – no more than a tree is only what you see above ground – it has roots that stretch and spread around, in fields, farms, and craggy grounds where only sheep will herd._

_That was First Seed, when there’s always money to be made for travellers who’ll help to sow. But I’m not strong, and it’s not a clansmer’s place to till and seed the earth. I didn’t work long. Only long enough to learn another thing — that farmers are stubborn and dull as dirt, but shepherds have enough dreaming in them to trust a little in magic. Come lambing-time, even the most Nord-minded will take whatever help they can, and not frown at where it’s from._

_He is a grizzled man, but clean-shaven in spite of the ragged fleece he wears, and the long crook he carries – gnarled like him – alongside all the other small proofs of his roughness and wildness. We stand a certain distance apart — in this misty Springtime rain, the whole Rift looks plated with pewter, shining grey from this high-up heath._

_“Lambing?” I ask, loud to overspeak the hissing wet weather._

_“Aye,” he says, leaning on his crook, with a ram worrying at the hems of his clothes._

_“You need help?”_

_“Depends.”_

_“On how much I know about —” I struggle for the words “— bringing lambs?”_

_“And how much do you?”_

_“Nothing. But I know things – charms, spells, those things – to help.”_

_For a time he stares at me, and the rain feels too hot on my skin, like steam. I am blushing. And he’s chewing and chewing the idea of me, seeing if he can stomach the taste. I know that, even looking at the sodden heath-grass around my boots, instead of at him — I’ve gotten used to seeing things I’m not facing, watching them with my bird’s way of looking, right-long, side-long…_

_“The ewes too?” he finally says._

_I don’t know that word. I rub the sheepskin of my drape between my fingers, then feel my smock underneath it. Then I try to be brave. “You mean the mothers?”_

_He nods._

_“Yes,” I say, “the mothers too.”_

_“Some kind of healer then are you?”_

_“Yes,” I smile closed-lipped at the ground with my eye fixed sly-timid on him. “Some kind.”_

_“And you’ll be wanting something for it? For your work?”_

_“Please. A roof — and a bath — just for a bit.”_

_“Aye,” he says again, and then says nothing else. But he turns and starts to walk, expecting me to follow._

…

The outhouse is narrow and low in the ceiling, with walls of flinty stone, daubed together to keep out drafts. But it fits only the borrowed copper tub, and my sleeping-skin crumpled on the earthen floor, strewn over with dry rushes. With its tightening cone of walls and roof, it’s like the topmost room of a tower, blown off in some gale and dropped high up on this heath, overlooking the crossroads of Shor’s Stone.

Even in Spring, the night outside is a cold one. I work quickly to dry myself, but my hair is thick and holds the wet all too well. I try not to consider my body too long, for all its awkward shapes. With my strangely mismatched limbs, Yennai – my friend, Yennai – said I was built like a hare: slim uncertain arms, hard sturdy thighs beginning a runner’s long gamy legs. My too too-narrow torso with its fading bruises. The scrawn of my neck. The wide-flared insult of my hips…

I try not to dwell too long. I wet the first two fingers of my right hand with the scented oil I bought – the golden piny musk of labdanum maybe, or burnt-up amber – and I dab coyly at my forehead, my wrists, the center of my chest. With what’s left, I anoint my underarms and the insides of my knees. I do not dwell long.

I dress quickly. I fumble on my leggings and breeches, then shrug into my under-shift. I have new warm woollen foot-wraps from the shepherd, and I put them on just before my boots. I get into my smock now for warmth, but leave it open, unbrooched.

My hands are as careful as I can make them, taking up the comb again, raking it through my hair. I tug, and it hurts, until six months of tangles are mostly undone. But those months did their own share of undoing — the braids Tanet worked among the other locks of my hair last Autumn came loose in my troubles and travels. I try to re-tie them, but my fingers are clumsy – and always have been, and always will be – and I only mat and knot the strands I try to plait.

I give up. I ball my fists and kiss my teeth harshly, muttering in Dunmeris: “My stupid hands — My stupid stupid hands — Break my blighted fingers and be done with it…” Saying it aloud is like feeding a fire with gushing air, letting it flare up so it’ll burn out all the quicker. It feels better now it’s been said, in my own mother-tongue, in this foreign borrowed place.

Even so, I wonder what it’s like for others — who have hands which do as they’re told, and fingers that don’t stutter; who always know where their arms, legs, and feet are, and whose bodies don’t forget themselves and invent accidents to hurt them.

…

_“It’s not just a blighted bowl, Tam! It’s not!” Tanet has one arm folded round herself, and her free hand flat to her face. I can see her knuckles are white. “It’s redware – Vvardenfell red clay, child – and some of the last we’ve got. It’s—…”_

_She trails off into a storm-brewing silence. I am not crying yet but can feel the sobs already, heaving in my chest, shuddering in my knees. Sometimes, at times like this, I wish Tanet was like Nanrahamma, and would just hit me when she’s angry, instead of this — the sharp shared pain of her disappointment and the rage I can see she turns inward._

_“Of course,” she says, quietly now. “But of course it doesn’t look like home to you, does it? It wouldn’t.”_

_It only looks like a broken bowl to me. Something else I couldn’t hold on to, no matter how precious I told my hands it was. And that’s enough. Even if it were the first time, it would be enough._

…

Six months and a little longer have happened to me, and heaped so much upon me, and left me tired. I let myself do things of my own now, by doing nothing — just passing time. Because the Harrowing is only a time to live out, and beyond that it’s what you make of it. I think till it’s almost a prayer: Let me make nothing, do nothing, just for a while.

I hear a wary howling, and from its timbre I can tell that only I can hear it, or else only I can hear it as a howl — for others it might be an odd note on the wind, but it comes in part from within me, and so I know it for what it is. Josket here in the hut with me; here in the silence of the kindling at the hearth, waiting to be set alight. Josket out in the darkness beyond these walls, running in the glide of the breeze. Something in it sets my teeth on edge.

Outside, the sheep begin to bray and groan. The noise the lambs make sounds more like screaming.


	17. Chapter 17

Today he comes through the grey light and eye-white mist that clings to the grass, with his ram by his side as always. There is dew in the fog, and rain on the grass from last night; it patches him darkly, up to the knees.

He finds me leaning and yawning against the mud and stone wall of the heathtop hut. I am pulling my smock about me, wrapping my arms round myself, hoping I can steal some of the confidence I remember Tanet having when she held herself like this. I am watching his flock, or most of it, scattered across the heath, fraying the briars and thistles with their teeth and tough lips.

He stands a stone’s throw from me, and comes to lean on his crook. He fixes me with a steady stare. Looking up, I try to meet it, but can only do it in glimpses; sidelong I glance at him, then down at the trampled grass round the old stone hut. He’ll ask – I know it – and I rub the fabric of my smock between my fingers, hoping it’ll soften the blow. When the question comes, it’s something else: strange and not the thing I was dreading.

“Decent fighter are you? Mm. Maybe not honestwise like normal, but then again you’ve got sorts of cleverness in you. Plenty of that. Aye. Tell me, Tam — got any cleverness for fighting do you?”

My lips are parted, and I breathe in sharply — tasting of dew on my tongue, the air stings cool at the roots of my teeth. He uses my shortest name while I’m still a stranger to him and him to me. It’s only because his tongue can’t work out my long proper name, but still it rubs me wrong and starts a prickling in the chambers of my chest, like the small start of anger. Tammunei; Tam-oo-nay; is that so hard?

“Cleverness?” I ask, clumsy in his clumsy tongue. I like the sound of that at least: like a quaint compliment, this Nord euphemism. “You mean like I used to help bring the lambs? — And to help their mothers?”

“Aye. Cleverness. Like with herbs, rhymes, runes.”

“I—…” Pausing, I chew at my lower lip, then look up at him sidelong. “Yes,” I say, “some.”

It’s a small word for the wisdom of the Ahemmusa and the Vereansu – or as much as I carry of either – but then again so is ‘cleverness’. So is ‘magic’, for everything it can be.

“Enough?” he asks, and weights the word so that I think I know it means ‘enough to protect them?; my flock?; from more than just wolves?’

“…Yes.”

“Then you can stay.”

He leaves soon after. I watch him turn, and I watch his back as he climbs his way surely down the heath to the house where he lives.

This has been the longest talk we’ve ever shared. Every day till now, he’s come like this to my borrowed hut at daybreak, and asked after his flock before anything else. How are the lambs and how are their mothers; their fleeces, hooves, and horns; whether they stick together or if there’s any that fall aside and apart from the rest. Fine and fine; well; yes, one small and black, that follows me sometimes and is well too, now with my help. And that’s enough for both of us.

But today the question he didn’t ask hung between us, and is hanging now like a stone round my neck. There are six less in his flock than yesterday, and he knows. Which is why he asked if I’ll let him lose any more.

Perhaps it’s some buried gristle of pride in me, hard to swallow or spit out. Or perhaps it’s to prove that I’m not how I was – prey, or something to be plucked up and appraised – and can be stronger than that. Or perhaps it’s Josket, pacing circles in the hollow under my lungs, and turning spirals like a buzzard in the wind above the grass, the mist, the heath; sounding like the mating of foxes in the night-distance, in a way only I can hear; sounding like the rushing of wings, inside and outside me.

A crowding flock of reasons – a pack snapping at my heels – perhaps they’re why I said yes. A small but dreadful word. Yes.

…

_I am on my knees. The hut’s walls steeple up around me until they become ceiling. A storm groans somewhere beyond what’s here and happening, now, now._

_The packed earth floor is newly wet under me with broken waters. Stripped to my under-shift, my arms are bare. The same wet glistens slick and livid on them._

_I am helping. It’s a feeling that starts like a voice raised up high and trembling – holding a note in a song, not knowing when the song and the note will both break – then becomes a rushing relief. Cool water on a parched throat. Cool air on my blood-hot arms._

_The lamb comes. Headfirst, then feet, then the rest. Then the heavy sack of wet-noise and half-flesh that comes after the birth’s done. I’m smiling now, with a thick bar of blush across my nose and cheeks._

_It’s easier than it should be, to help like this. Perhaps it’s because of my dreams. In the dreams that come from the Ghostline I’ve been many things. Mother – midwife – child. Perhaps that counts for something._

…

The shepherd’s wife is smaller, rounder, and kinder than him. He shows his age in an ageless way, like rocks do, or gnarled things made of wood. With her, the lines of her face set me at ease — it’s the same for the creak of her voice, and her almond-shaped leaf-green merish eyes that make me wonder…

She comes a little after him, and I know from the times before that she brings mixed blessings along with her. She talks more than her man does, and expects more talk back. And though I know I should train my tongue better in Tamrielic, her chatter and her waiting silences make me more nervous than the short exchanges I have with the shepherd. But she also brings kind words, and kind things, until I almost don’t mind that she comes into my hut without rites — her visitor’s gifts are enough to quiet my clansmer’s yurt-pride.

Today she finds me starting a fire between my rubbing hands, and coaxing it into the kindling with a whisper. She doesn’t flinch or blink to see me work the spell, but squats by me and sits a cloth-covered earthen pot on the ground between us.

“Juniper jam,” she says, “it’s for you. I’d of brought some bread or somesuch too, only the bakers hain’t baking any lately. So there’s none to be had for trade nor coin. None at all.”

“Why?” I ask, though I think I already have the beginning of the answer.

The flames begin to take, and smoke threads up from under my palms, and the small spell-help of my paltry fire-calling. Finally the fire is hot enough to smart at my fingers, and I know it will catch now. I take my hands away and start to build up deadwood over it.

“Hain’t just been our sheep gone missing. Tools, pigs, cattle, and all sorts else besides. Someone’s telling us how Spring’s raiding season and how it’s high time we remember that.”

“Oh,” I say. The knowledge I already had grows in my chest — the feeling is a fruit-stone, coming out into dark buried life. “Do you know who?”

“Aye, I’ve a few thoughts. But more like they’ll come say as who they are soon enough, of their own will. So runs the way with these things.”

She takes the twine from the clay-pot’s rim and peels away the cloth. She wipes her fingers on her skirts and dips them into the jar. They come out again dark with jam.

“Weeks of petty pilfering, dancing round each other like shy youngins with a fancy they share but won’t speak. Then come the proper raids, with livelihoods getting caught up in them. Then someone’ll call out the other, or else they’ll come name themselves, and there’ll be a shield-meet, and the winner’ll talk terms. And Spring’ll be over by then, and Summer’ll come, and we’ll go back to our farms and our peacetime practice like nothing at all happened…Tradition’s what the men-folk call it. Foolishness – games – that’s what we say of it — me and my Hrulden, who’ve seen enough Springs to know it by now…But does it make a blind scrap’s difference? Does it shit…”

She’s offered me the jam. I clean one finger with my mouth and taste a little. It’s bitter-sweet, hot and cold, almost spicy. “Thank you,” I say. And for a time we sit in silence, eating jam with our hands.

In my head, I stir up what I know, like stew. That the country-Nords steal from each other in Springtime, and call it sport while calling us sneak-thieves and kidnappers. That this is something I’ve been spared from behind Windhelm’s walls, at the cost of being so close to the heart of their hatred as to not be able to sleep for the sound of its beating. Half of me thinks they’re savages. Half of me is content to think their ways are their own, and natural to them as swallows moving with the seasons — why then have I been pulled into their current and their rhythms?

“Please,” I say eventually, “what is a shield-meet?”

…

_“My mother was a warrior! My mother was wife to two khans and better than both of them! Outliving both of them, thanks-be!” I throw the words like stones. Or I try to._

_“And you outlived her,” says one of the Quarter mer, sneering. “Does that make you stronger too?”_

_“We should be shaking,” says the other._

_“Oh, we should be running!”_

_They laugh._

_“Blood me,” I hiss, “and it’ll burn you up, House-scum! It’s her—…It’s her blood—…” My voice catches and breaks into weak nothing. I can’t speak and can’t fight — I have none of her strength, none of her blood after all. Clumsy – stupid – feeble – Tam._

_“Your mother’s dead and forgotten. Voided ‘cos her ghost-kin wouldn’t have her. And before that she was a mad sick cripple, just leeching till she was lucky enough to die. And before that?”_

_“Before that,” the other carries on, “she was a nix-bitch and nothing else, birthing a brat at every crossroads. Scattering grubs like you to the winds like a danda-flower scatters seed.”_

_“Say it. What was she?”_

_I want to say no but can’t make the words come. I shake my head. That’s all the defiance I can give._

_“One more chance.”_

_I shake my head and then empty my thoughts so what’s coming won’t hurt as much. They hit me then. And I can’t fight back because Yennai is gone. And because I’m not strong like her, or strong like my mother. And I’m not wise yet either._

_“And what does that make you?”_

_Nothing. Nothing at all._

…

Is that why I said yes?

Or is it what the shepherd’s wife said to me, with all the power of prophecy — about how I’d have no choice?

‘When the first raid comes in daylight. And when they come here, and drag you out, and make sure you can’t fight. When you’re out in the night air, and everything sounds like splinters and shouting and steel. When the sheep stop mattering anymore. That’s how you’ll know the shield-meet’s come.’

I keep my use-knife fastened to my thigh now, and live in a waiting so thick the minutes ooze, and I can hardly breathe through these syrupy seconds. I watch the herd. With another night purpling the sky, the waiting loosens and thins. I sing out a call in my head-voice. Ambling home and flocking inward, the sheep all answer my spell.


	18. Chapter 18

_The fire is built from murmuring peat. It must burn long against the dark, and the black square of heath-sod will keep it fed. The ghosts are quiet tonight. The wind moans outside, but within that noise even Josket is eerie-quiet._

_In the yard of the shepherd’s house, they slaughtered a young sheep. A hogget is what they called it — but it was also a kind of sacrifice, for not knowing whether they’ll have a herd at all come morning. The shepherd gave me scraps of neck, breast, and shoulder. I pick at the meat with my greased-glistening fingers._

_My blackened bronze teapot sits over the fire’s glow. I brew the tea strong beyond my taste, crumbling in cinderbark, canisroot, hungervine — I must stay awake. Me, the fire, the ghosts, Josket — we wait but don’t wait long._

_Dusk’s hardly started, but outside the sheep are braying. Footsteps tread the ground beyond my hut’s drape-drawn door. I feel Josket’s howl more than I hear it. In the hackling rise through the roots of my hair; in the quickening thunder of blood behind my eyes; the wary tightness of my muscles._

_A sword parts the curtain that covers my doorway. A stranger comes in after. Without a visitor’s gift, without visitor’s rites, he comes into the place I’ve made my home. He holds a sword-point steady at me across the fire and says:_

_“Easy now…”_

_His soft eyes say what he thinks of me. I see myself reflected in them: an elf, young enough to be barely grown; small and alone with a sidelong look he thinks is shy or scared. He talks to me like a skittish colt._

_He won’t drag me from here. He won’t touch me. I ball these words up inside me and hold them like a sky gathers up rain and rage to split open into storming when it needs to._

_I fix him with both my eyes – the one that sees dull and the one that sees bright – and I reach slowly to my side, into the folds of my smock._

_“Easy,” he says again, and lowers his sword. “See? I’ve heard they call you Tam? I’m not here to hurt you, Tam.”_

_I want to snap and snarl at him for presuming to know what to call me. Worse for presuming wrong. But I bite the urges back. I look him over – his fine-combed beard and flax-blonde hair and good boots – and I say: “Then why are you here?”_

_“To call you up. It’s started, and I’d heard you said…”_

_“I know what I said.”_

…

Shor’s Stone has no official lord or master. It has a carl who keeps order, respect, and much of the town’s wealth, by owning the greater share of its mine, and much of the land, rented out to tennant-farmers. This man – young, with his fair fine beard and his sword – is the carl’s son.

He told me this. But he said he has no title. I must call him Alfrind, he said.

He has the air of a man well-practised at making others keep their promises. There’s something of that in the unfaltering edges of his smile, and the easy line of his shoulders. He’s also unused to being refused. So he led me — I followed.

We stand at the crest of the heath now, and look down. Smoke rises in columns; there are fires in the fields round Shor’s stone taller than people. The wind has no definite direction today, and smells of steel and fire. The sun is pewter grey behind clouds. The whole town has its voice raised — I can hear but not make sense of it, even from here.

“They’re burning things,” says Alfrind, hand on the grip of his sword, which is sheathed now. “The outhouses and seed-grain stores — that’s to starve us into trade when this is done. The stooks and pyres? They’re just to let all the folk know it’s starting.”

“The shield-meet?” I ask.

“Aye,” he says. There’s silence for a time as he reaches into a bag fastened to his belt. He brings out a small purse. “There’s still time to leave if your heart’s not in it. You’re no son of Shor’s Stone; we’re no kin to you. But there’s always room for skilled strangers at a shield-meet, so my father says. Stay,” he smiles at me, “and you’ll get your share of this.”

He jostles the purse. I can hear the slither of coin against coin inside. I haven’t so much as touched a coin in weeks, and been hale and happy enough for it.

“Tell me how to help,” I say.

“Come,” he says with a sideways jerk of his head. We hurry down the heathside and into the outskirts of town.

…

_“You’ve got a sword.” Those are my wide-eyed words. “How did you get a sword?”_

_“Hey now,” says Yennai, wide-grinning, ruby-eyed. “It’s hardly big enough to be a sword. More like a big knife really. See?”_

_She holds it out to me. It makes me think of a nix-hound pointing toward something, aching to get at it — its spine is straight and its one edge begins broad then slants and curves to meet the back in a hard point. The grip is plated with bonemold._

_“It was my mother’s,” she says, “and now it’s mine.”_

_“It’s lovely,” I say, not looking at the sword because my eyes have gotten stuck on her. The line of her jaw, and the wisps of hair that’ve escaped her top-knot, silvery, like moonlight glancing from behind a cloud. “You can’t wear it out here – can you? – the guards will see and take it. Or something worse.”_

_“Won’t need to,” she says, “not for much longer anyway. I won’t be here. It’s a gift, isn’t it? To see me through my Harrowing!”_

…

A storm. It’s like a storm. Or is it now was? In shapes and sounds we saw it coming, rushing down the heath into smoke and noise. Then it was on us – over us, clamouring round us – and I knew those portents were nothing compared to this: the storm, the shield-meet. It was in me too; so big it pushed out everything else, and all I could be was part of all that storming.

There’s clarity now in the calm that comes after.

I am breathing sharp. The short heaves claw at my throat like sobbing. But my eyes are dry, like they get from not blinking — like they get from staying watchful, too alert for too long. A glaring-bright feeling rings high in my head, too awake to really be sane. I’m chattering in a chaos of languages:

“What happened? Where am I? What happened what happened?”

I don’t know when I started. I make myself stop. My eyes roll back – there’s a roof over my head – and my eyes slant down to see a hand on my arm that I only feel now that I’ve seen it.

I’ve been trying to slow my breaths. Because Nanrahamma told me once that everyone has their heartbeats numbered and when they’re used up that’s when they die. She said that living long like her and some other mer do isn’t magic — just slow calm breathing and slow careful living. Like a tree, like the earth’s ever-growing bones, slow.

Now my breath catches, races, heart hammering again. A stranger has her hand on my arm. I snatch it back and burrow into the bed of piled-up rags and pelts I’m in.

“What happened?” I hiss again with wide eyes and bared teeth. “What? Happened?”

She takes back her hand and presses one finger to her lips, and hushes me without making a sound. Out of habit I stare her over with both eyes. She’s half clear and half dull, with features distorted, some standing out. Her eyes are a sea-coloured silver. Her hair is many colours. But no. I think at first her hair is many colours, then see that it’s cloth, wrapped tight and high on her head.

“Be calm, dove, be steady,” she speaks slow and deliberate. Smooth voice, rough hands. “You have time to be slow. Like rowing a boat into harbour. Row slow, strong, well-guided. Thrash and the waves will take you again…And breathe. And breathe…”

I am easing now. My heart settles. I breathe out, and breathe out the storm from me. I find clarity – or the frayed beginning-most thread of it – and realise she’s speaking Dunmeris, though I don’t recognise the accent or split of it. I look at her the way I look clearly now, sidelong, with my one good eye. She’s no mer.

“You hadn’t seen battle before, had you, dove?”

I shake my head.

“You’re doing well. Coming out of the waves now, and into calmer waters.”

“What?”

“Your body’s still frightened. Thrashing up waves in your mind, some shouting ‘kill’ and others yelling ‘run’ — do you see? It’s instinct. Can be a good thing too, if you use it right. But it’s ebbing away now. Letting you rest.”

“Enjoy it while you can. You’ll get sick after. That’s why her people call it the waves. Not used to riding them? You’ll get sick.”

It’s a new voice. I search it out to a corner of the small room. A Dunmer leans there, with chalk-white long hair tied up in a knot, and eyes the colour of new bruises. His face is not kind like hers.

“Don’t mind Talhril,” she says, gentler than him. It seems like a well-trodden phrase: one she’s said before, and before, and before. “You’re doing well — didn’t I say you’re doing well?”

“What happened?” I ask again, but clear this time. They’re words I think to ask, not just animal noise that’s twisted itself to sound like words because that was the easiest way to come out.

“A shield-meet,” says the Dunmer she called Talhril. Distaste sounds in his voice.

…

_It’s a bristling line. Like a hedge of vying bodies. My mind is hammered thin and singing high. Down through my gut, it tells my feet: don’t stop. I run. Alfrind runs ahead, sword-drawn._

_“Right into the back of them,” he said to me. “Scatter them in seconds. Like eagles among the crows!”_

_There is a hung moment when we cover the last stone’s-throw. It’s too fast, too sure now, to stop. We’re amongst them, in the hedge of bodies. It’s all thorns – stick and cling; claw and bite – it’s all too close. They don’t scatter._

_What comes now comes as dreaming pictures, broken to bits by being too much, too large to be anything but simple and static. Pick up the pieces, Tam._

_A Nord, stripped to the waist and painted in chalk, comes over the line, darts like a hawk, casts about with two axes. She carves a hole round herself. Her axes fall just short of me. She stops them before she strikes, and she cuts a path now, back through the line, to be swallowed by her own side again._

_A giant – he must be a giant – with a pick turned to warring not mining. He brings the pick down, shouts words I can’t hear because I can’t hear a thing, and caves a man in from shoulder to hip. Both bellow like bulls. One stops._

_Alfrind has his sword through someone. Alfrind is picked up in a tackle-handed wave of two. Hands grasp then hit. Borne to the ground, they make sure he can’t get up. Their knives are small so they stick him over and over. Alfrind: full of small holes; face wide in surprise._

_The line breaks apart. I have been a we all this time. Battle split to a hundred small brawls, I am a me again. And I am fending for myself? And I am red to the elbow, with knuckles so tight round the grip of my use-knife I don’t know how they’ll ever let go._

…

“It’s Nord business,” says Talhril, “Three in One only know why you got mixed up in a thing like that…”

“You aren’t Nords,” I say. “Neither of you are. So why did you?”

They share a look, then the woman begins to speak.

“I don’t know if the Nords think of it as sport or war, and I don’t know if they really know either anymore…”

“That’s tradition for you,” murmurs Talhril.

“But to an outsider?” she continues. “Two towns – villages, hamlets, whatever – start a dance of raiding, stealing, name-calling, and loud noises in the night, until enough’s enough and a time’s called for a shield-meet. To an outsider – outsiders like us – that looks a lot like a pitched battle, doesn’t it? Battle in the Nordic style. Two lines of shields – two shieldwalls – coming together to push and shove while daring or stupid folks try to get through or round the line, pick fights, win glory. Until one side falters and their shield-wall breaks…”

“They’re the losers after that,” says Talhril. “They give back what they’ve raided, and a bit of interest on top. Like a gift to say they’re not sore or ashamed. Bigger and better that shield-share is, the less face they lose to the other towns. Why Nords can’t just trade goats and pelts like anyone else is beyond me…”

“What Talhril is trying to say,” the woman explains, “is that there’s glory for both sides just for taking part, but that doesn’t mean either one wants to lose. Hamlets and such keep their shield-meets to themselves, but it’s not uncommon for bigger towns to…”

“Outsource,” says Talhril. “Hlaalu word but that’s what it is.”

“Mm. They outsource people like us. Professionals. To help them win.”

“Mercenaries like us.”

“Like you too,” says the woman. There’s a small red-dyed kerchief in her hand. A rag binds its corners together, tying it into a makeshift purse. “This is yours,” she says, and offers the purse on an open hand. “We won.”


	19. Chapter 19

“What did I do?”

“What?” The woman furrows her brow. Her lower lip is full and pierced through with one bright sun-coloured ring; she draws it into her mouth when she frowns.

“To deserve it? The coins. I didn’t fight. Am I hurt?” I hold the makeshift purse in my hands. Looking at them, I hope them into not-shaking. My stupid fingers fumble at the binding till the purse opens out. My palm is pooled with smallish coins; some are struck from misty silver, most are blunt black iron. “Did I fight then?”

The Dunmer gives a snort. “In your way,” he says.

He slouches from the corner and leans out of the room’s doorway to call out in Tamrielic, “Where’s our blasted medicine? We ordered another dose near on an hour ago now!”

He has the same air that Alfrind did — like he’s used to getting what he asks for. A milk-skinned serving girl bustles in with a tray.

“Ah! Come on, come on. In and out with you, leave it there, sweetness…”

Hurried along by his words, she sets it down on a low table at the small room’s side, and is out a few blinks later. The tray holds a clay jug, its mouth seeping steam; and a small dish of puffy disks I think must be biscuits; and an irregular tower of clay cups.

“Talhril…” the woman chides, and I can’t tell if it’s for the way he spoke to me or to the serving girl. She turns back to me. “We found you looking like a fox that got in amongst the chickens. Crouched and ready to spring, wild-eyed and spattered with blood…”

“A fearful vision. Truly,” Talhril says, almost but not quite cruel. Already he’s poured himself a cup, taken an oat-biscuit, and started to eat and drink — he talks while chewing.

“You were still high on the waves even after the shield-meet was over, dove,” she turns to me now. “Coiled near the body of some big giant-blooded lump of a Nord, snarling at anyone who got close. We brought you here…”

Staring at my hands, I see that they’re clean. Under the weight of the rag-heaped bed, I’m in my under-shift, which is clean too. My heart swells and stutters again. I think: she’s undressed me, or someone has. I think: she’s touched my skin to clean it. I try not to let my breath hitch, but the feeling is almost like fear.

“Where’s my smock?” I ask sharply. “And my boots and all?”

“They’re being cleaned,” she says, patient and slow with me. “At least, as best they can be. You’ll get them back soon, dove, don’t you worry.”

“Soon? I — sorry — thank you.” I pause. I start to ask again, trying to be lucid, and to keep the stranger-shyness from my voice. “What should I call you? And him?” There’s more I want to ask, but I stop myself.

“’Sedura’ would be a good start,” Talhril murmurs.

“Tssh,” she sounds, and I wonder at how like a paired hunter and nix-hound they are, one ever veering off, ill-mannered, and the other holding it in check with a leash of scolding words. “Just call him Talhril. Anything else only helps him lie to himself.” She shoots him a warning look and fills two cups from the still-steaming jug. She drinks, hands me the other cup, and a biscuit. “As for me? My name is Atadi. Of Rihad. And neither one of us knows what to call you, dove. But first, eat, drink, get strong and steady again — sweet things will help.”

I look at the cup, and smell its sharp-sweet scent. I look at the biscuit. A kind of angry fear stirs somewhere in my throat, remembering Amarin, and remembering to be cautious. But they’ve eaten and drunk from the same plate, the same jug. And I can scent no poison — only oats and butter; heat, honey, alcohol.

But he called it medicine. I drink. It’s sweet, and I nod my thanks. But it’s not medicine.

“I’m Tammunei Ereshkigal,” I say. “You can call me Tammunei — if you like?”

…

_Food for us or medicine for her. The choice wasn’t mine to make — I’m still a child; too young to speak sense. Yet still I hoped a hope – shaped like a fish-hook, out from my navel, sharply pulling – and my hope was the choice that they choose._

_To the three things we give her we add a fourth now: jerdura peel, bought with money that could have fed all four of us for a handful of days. We add it to numb her suffering, so she sees, hears, speaks, but can’t feel, can’t taste._

_She’s worsening. It’s in her heart and marrow now. I smell it on her hair. My mother’s scent is the poison that’s killing her._

_I mix her medicine, not needing Nan to help now. I’ve lost part of my childhood to alchemy for her. If I could do more by losing more, I would. If I could starve to stop the poison, not just to let her forget it—?_

…

“It’s not what we were promised. Barely half as heavy as it should be. Talk about grief taking its toll…”

“Mm. Funny how losing a son and heir can tend to turn a man’s generosity sour.”

“We were not paid to protect him, Talhril. We fight, we get half. We win, we get the whole stars-burnt sum. Those were the terms! And we won, didn’t we?”

“The shield-meet, maybe. But I can see why the carl may not see it that way. He lost a lot more than a few blighted goats.”

“Easy enough for you to be complacent, hm? When the only overheads you’ve got to think about are how long you can stay drunk before you’ve got to knock some skulls together again to pay for your next round.”

“‘Overheads?’ There you go again, talking like a Hlaalu. ‘Wealth Beyond Measure’, huh? And what about honour — or family?”

“I’m talking like a businesswoman, Tal. Satakei! You’re not the one who’s going to have to forge horseshoes and miner’s picks till we’ve got enough money for the iron I’ll need to forge anything else! Anything real and worthy! Come, your shield won’t unbuckle itself now, will it?”

The two mercenaries talk amongst themselves, swearing and arguing in a gaggle of languages I half-understand. I drift in and out of sleeping. With fluttering eyes, in this heap of pelts and rags, I walk dreaming paths, and travel roads that lead to remembering.

…

_His pick cleaves arcs through the air. He is learning. No more downward strikes like he’s breaking stone. The new way he swings is harder to get away from. They are strikes for breaking bodies._

_I retreat, back, back, and backing away. I’m faster than his swings, but not graceful. I struggle – stumble – out of danger, into danger, and know that one stumble too hobbling will end me on the point of his iron._

_Sweat stings my skin. The ground is difficult. My ears ring to save me from the sound. My footing fails me. I fall. The pick rises and makes to fall after. I grope for safety. The shield I find has already failed its previous owner but it’s not broken. I wrench it from his cooling fingers. I heft it up with red noise roaring in my throat._

_Strike._

_Splinters shower my face. My shoulders and arms glare with off-white pain. Fear and the sting of this churn and coil. I hear howling in my head, beyond my red-deaf ears. A snarled bare-toothed feeling fills me in answer. The howl is part of me._

_I lurch into his reach – wherever is furthest from the head of his pick – and judder to my feet. I reach for my side, past blood-stiff cloth, and take it into the palm of my hand. Horn and bone, wood and hair, flint, and a name I reach for and call out:_

_“Josket.”_

_The air was spooled with smoke before. But now there’s a hum to it – a shimmering – and a sound like beating wings. The smoke takes something like form. Then it has teeth and claws and a cry. Not bird, or wolf, or even my own voice, but something like and unlike all these. And it screeches down to hurt him before he can come at me again. My sivami, come to safeguard me. With cry and claw it comes._

_The man with the pick has faltered now – is falling – and his face is streaming red. He clutches it in his hands. But through his grasping fingers I see—…_

…

“It took his eyes — My sivami — It came and took his…”

I wake. At first the sweat feels blood-warm on me, then quickly turns iron-cold. I’m looking up at the same roof as before: smoke-stained thatch, peat and clay daub. The room is the same, the bed the same. But Talhril and Atadi are silent — I can feel their eyes on me.

“What in Onsi’s name is a sivami, dove?” Atadi finally asks.

“It’s a — what?” I falter. There’s no easy answer: I have the magic but not the understanding. “It’s a spirit? Mine sort of, but more like we’re each other’s. A ghost-thing. Or maybe that’s just what it was and not what it is now. I don’t know… I gave it a name and a home, sort of in me and near me, so it keeps me safe.”

I let myself breathe, feeling like I’ve been running and’ve only now let myself stop, and rest.

“That’s more words than I ever thought I’d hear you utter at once, dove. Grant me a moment to make sense of them…”

“Sounds ashlander. Or Temple,” Talhril thinks aloud; he’s a loud thinker, I’m coming to realise. “They’re the only ones I know of who make peeling yams sound like philosophy. Can’t explain a blighted thing without saying it’s everything and nothing all at once. So which are you? Temple or ashlander?”

“Clansmer,” I say, and try to put pride in the words. “My mother was Jemikh, khan’s-wife of the Ahemmusa and the Vereansu, and—…”

“Ashlander then,” Talhril cuts me off. “Thought your name sounded it.”

“Dunmer witchcraft, ashlander spirit-talking…” says Atadi. “Whatever it is, whatever you are… What I think you are is lucky. Or plain useful. Going into battle green, and coming out red with none of it yours? That’s no small thing, Tammunei.”

“So you’re welcome,” Talhril says.

“With us,” Atadi corrects him. “We’ll be skipping town soon. Doesn’t seem like the carl wants any reminders of the shield-meet sticking around too long, and we’re just that. Grim reminders. Things can get prickly like this, so we know to leave before they do. What my colleague means is, when we go, you’re welcome to come.”

“Go with you?” I repeat the words to taste them, feel them in my mouth. “You’ll be travelling, then? Where’ll you go?”

“Oh,” Atadi says. “Anywhere at all. Anywhere we like. Southish maybe?”

“Or else North where there’s new raids bound to be coming to a head,” says Talhril. “Wherever the wind blows and coin flows.”

I think a moment, looking into the palms of my hands, like they’re cupped full of answers. Like some wise-womer read portents in tea-leaves, I look over their lines. The four old worn paths of my rough right hand; the raised seam of scar they all take turns to cross; four ways over a silver-pale river. I think of what they’ve said and offered – protection, deeds and coin for them – but most of all I think of travelling, and what the Harrowing means to me.

I nod uncertainly. “There’s some things…”

“Not sure?” Atadi raises her brows at me and makes a gentle face. “Give it a week. Finish with Shor’s Stone — that’s what we’ll be doing. Then come with us or don’t. Your choice.”

I get up. My body feels mostly mine again, and my head is clear enough.

And then the waves spit me out onto the shore. They throw me high and lurch me low, and close over my head, and leave me. It’s not panic but a sudden roiling physical thing. My body rebels; my insides reject me; I seize a pot from the floor — I vomit. And I crouch, moaning, shuddering, as I wait for the sickness to pass.

I think: Stupid Tam, too hasty; they did warn you.

I’m put back to bed, and swaddled in pelts and rags like a newborn. My dreams are fevered before I even know I’m sleeping, but sleep’s an unsteady stream now, with me adrift in its estuary. I come awake, I drift again; I come awake, I fall. I meander between waking and not.

In the night, and the night-wind, breezing through the rafters and worrying at the thatch, I hear whispers beyond Talhril and Atadi’s talk. I don’t feel them through any ties I have – not through my blood or Ghostline – so they’re hard to understand, more noise than speech. But I hear them all the same.

Shor’s Stone is full of ghosts, where before it was silent unless I listened hard and long. Now they want to be heard. So I hear, because someone has to.

I sleep. And the sickness passes. The voices do not stop.


	20. Chapter 20

_Today they cleared the field. Poor souls with shawls and rags over mouths and noses, trying not to breathe while they picked through the trampled furrows. Soil tilled but not seeded, except with corpses, already starting to fruit and bloat, and reach into town with their reek. So the karl gave orders — they cleared the field._

_There weren’t many dead. Talhril says that shield-meets are more formality and sport than real battle. They let bad-blood but limit true bloodshed. They let the Nords play at war without actually waging it. Not that I’d know the difference. Most who fought went away bruised and tired. Of the injured most have recovered already, but some are recovering still. And then there are those who fell: seventeen in number. All are returned to their families now, and being readied to go to their rest._

_So why can I hear them?_

_They have voices – no, one voice – but no words between them. Their ghosts are still bound and stitched together by the mind-knitting power of battle. Their ghosts are one ghost, made of animal feelings: the hate, the fear, the eyeless lust; the things that filled them in their last hours, before the field took them._

_Blood on the soil, disappeared and drunk up, wet underfoot. Blood beneath the soil, fruiting, seeding, invisibly there. Is that what I can hear tonight? The anguish and the sudden endings? Is that what I can hear?_

_I wonder if it’s that, not the ghosts themselves, for they’ve no ties to me. Except perhaps the one: they speak to me, wordlessly, because I’m the only one listening._

…

Atadi works the forge. She rents it with her labour, making horseshoes, making nails. The first six shoes or the first dozen nails are what pays for the fire, the peat and charcoal, and the small smithy to work in – so she says – and after that the forge is truly hers. And I sit by, in its warmth, and feel the dance of flames and the breath of bellows on my skin, and in the folds of my clothes.

“Not enough just to dent it out again,” she says. “You’ve got to tame the metal, almost anew. Soothe it and soften it. Then you can work it back into shape. Like setting a bone. You can’t just force it; you’ve got to make it want to grow and mend right — see?”

The first half-dozen horseshoes are done with. The sun’s just gone overhead; midday’s melted off, and left afternoon behind. Atadi sweats over Talhril’s shield; she strengthens what’s got weak; she straightens what’s struck crooked. Its shape makes me think of a crab’s thick claw, the one used for crushing not cutting: grey iron over lacquered layered wood; dished a little, notched in places round the rim, for purposes I can’t understand. Its face was painted once, I think, but has since been scratched bare.

“Why are you trying to teach me?” I ask. Her Dunmeris is good but not native, and I think perhaps it’s more polite to speak a tongue more natural to her. So when I ask, I ask in Tamrielic. And when I fumble for words, I return to my mother’s tongue. This is how we talk.

“Because you’re learning,” she grunts, working out the final crease from the metal, “Aren’t you? You’ve got a learning sort of look about you, whatever you’re doing. The way you watch, maybe. Either that or you’re so quiet it’s like you must be listening.”

I don’t think I’m quiet, only short-spoken. I worry I won’t say the right thing, and so I say nothing at all. But all the while my thoughts are loud and fast as rushing water — they always have been.

“…and the questions!” she carries on. “Most everything you say’s a question, even when you’re not actually asking anything.”

She shakes her head and mops her brow. Her full mouth’s grinning, suddenly wide. She looks at me, and I realise I’m sweating too, in the heat of the smithy, watching the heat of her work.

“Don’t know why I bother,” she says. “Or why you do. It takes a lifetime to learn to work metal like this. I started when I was even younger than you are now…”

I blink – one eye quick; then the other, always late, a little behind – and I feel my dewy brow furrow. My lips are parched by the warmth in the air, and I dart out my tongue to soothe them. When I speak, I’m not looking at Atadi, but at the shield, her tools, the forge-fire — everything but her.

“I’m not trying to learn to work metal.” I say it slow and careful, like finding my way in the dark, with groping hands and shuffling feet. “I’m — listening. You’re making the metal sing? And I’m just trying to hear it better.”

She pauses. I can feel her sea-silver eyes on me, in the prickling of my skin, like I’m being touched, or weighed, or measured. Then she shrugs, and the pinprick-weight of being gazed at gapes open and slips away.

“Suit yourself,” she says. “I don’t mind the company but I’d prefer if you made yourself useful. Ever worked a bellows? It’s easy enough. Start and stop when I say and you’ll go far, dove — what d’you say you help me make that music you’ve been listening to?”

I don’t say that I’ve also been looking at her. Her brown bare arms are lean and firm, and constellated with small marks – burns old and new; cuts and one sallow bruise on her shoulder – and I’ve been trying and failing at not mapping them.

And I don’t say that I’ve been listening because her smithy – no, hers only after the first dozen or half-dozen – is the only place in this town that has a song which drowns out the field, and the voice and call of its newly-knit ghost.

I settle down on my knees by the bellows. I start when she says to start. I work my wiry arms till they ache; the forge-fire sighs, satisfied, as I feed it. Atadi works with tongs, mittens, and three types of hammer, to soften and cast, shape and quench the metal. I listen as best I can; I learn, but not from her.

Night’s falling when we’re done, but the smithy and our skins glow, like we’ve drunk up all the light from the day we’ve worked through, shut away here. We give it out in our blushing cheeks, flushed shoulders, glistering brows and arms.

“…Stronger than you look,” she pants so I can hear her breath.

“I’m not strong,” I say, breathless too. I’m working the ache from my arms, stretching up, stretching outwards, turning and turning my wrists so the hard tight feeling doesn’t settle in and turn to pain. “Just tireless.”

I like that word in Tamrielic. The sound of it; its feel in my mouth; and the modest pride of wearing it myself, like a name sewn into the lining of my names. I’m smiling at her — my smile covers one half of my face; my gaze comes from the other.

“Tammunei the Tireless,” she says the words like she likes them too. “It could stick, couldn’t it?”

“Stick?” I ask. “Oh! Stay — you mean stay. Stick to me.” I hum somewhere in the back of my mouth to fill the silence I want to sink into. “At what cost?” I finally say. “Being tireless sounds very tiring…”

She bares her white teeth, draws the lip-ring into her mouth, snorts through her nose. She moves carelessly, and acts carelessly — like I’ve never been able to, always having to be careful, and never being careful enough.

I think: can I learn that from her too? I think: of course not, you’re yourself; you can’t change your clumsy hands like putting off a pair of gloves; can’t fix the wrong in your limbs like fixing a shield, or mending a bone. I think about that, and go silent again.

“Sure you don’t want your sword sharpened or shined sometime?” she reaches into my quiet. “Least I can do.”

…

_It’s not my sword._

_But they give it to me with my smock and shoes as if it should be just as familiar, and I should be just as happy to get it back. It’s a long shape, wrapped rough in sack-cloth, tied twice over with rag-rope. I don’t have to look inside to know it’s not mine. But my hands are curious, and my thoughts follow after. I untie the bindings and unfurl the cloth._

_As long as my arm, straight and wide, then coming to a point. The steel is patterned, like veins under skin. The blade stops at a small pair of horns. The grip’s leather is soft under my fingers, daring to touch it before I’ve told them to. At the end of that is a shape that makes me think of a seashell._

_It’s pretty but feels wrong; looks wrong under my fingers; would look worse still in my hand._

_I tell Talhril and Atadi ,“It’s not my sword,” with a voice flat as the face of the sky._

_They say: “But you were holding it when we found you.” They’re used to goods reborn when repossessed: things that start new lives after their old owners’ ends. They can’t sense the traces they leave behind like I can — but here I don’t need to._

_It’s Alfrind’s. I recognise it. He’s dead, and the sword’s no-one’s now. But that doesn’t make it mine. It still remembers his touch._

…

“He won’t have us much longer,” says Talhril. He stares into the fire of our campsite, and the fire stares back, reflected in his eyes. “Men like him never want mercs like us to hang around any longer than their use for us goes. I give it three days more.”

He and Atadi are across from each other, he on a fallen waystone, she setting canvas and rope up between the stones that remain standing. This was perhaps a sacred place once, for the Nords or whoever came before — what remains is a broken circle of stony teeth, weather-worn, and with our campfire dug into its middle.

I work the fire as they talk. Between us three, I’m the only one who cooks, and they like me for that in a way I’m not used to. I boil porridge in my teapot over the flames. When they die down, I’ll bake tender-skinned Springtime squash in the embers. It keeps me a comfortable kind of quiet as they talk over me.

“Mm. Speak for yourself,” says Atadi. “Tal here has tales aplenty of how fine the line is between bandits and freelancers who’ve been paid too little for too long.”

“No,” he says, and beats her humour flat. “We’re not doing anything like that. Not this time.”

I look up at the two mercenaries.

Talhril’s mouth is set hard. I know him well enough by now to see his balled-up fists — they’re tight-held to the leash he uses to keep the worst of himself from the world. It’s a strange kind of honour, and he keeps to it like a once-wounded walker treads light on a once-broken leg.

“So he underpays us,” Atadi’s voice is sing-song with scorn. “Then he claps a curfew on us – no mercs within the bounds of the town-proper after sundown – like we’re children that’ve misbehaved. Turns us to squatters, here in the outskirts. And we’re just meant to carry along on our merry way, like we haven’t been wronged. Where’s your pride, Tal?”

“Two days ago, the karl buried his only son,” Talhril says, evenly through even teeth. “Entombed or embalmed, or however the Nords do it. Let him grieve in peace, let the dead rest, and let the matter lie. My pride won’t let me do anything but.”

I listen to them argue but in time I stop hearing. The sense bleeds from their words. At night, the ghost gets louder. Clamouring, hungering, it fears, it wants. Without those needs, it’s nothing. Not like those in the Ghostline, kept from the void by care and remembrance, remaining to guide and protect — this is a thing kept tied to the world by the things that won’t let it rest.

The ghost – no, ghosts, for it’s multiple now – fill my head till it feels like a pot, boiling up and over. Wordless anguished noise, reaching out to anyone who’ll hear. Then words, splintering off from the chorus, louder than the rest and meant for me.

…

_Thief._

_It reaches into me, through my skin. It drags me into myself._

_Tam._

_It knows my name – my closest name, smallest, most fragile – and wraps it tight around me. I’m transfixed by listening._

_Give. It. Back._

_It gropes, holds, twists. I hurt. The feeling is like burning, branding. I cry out—…_

…

“I will! It’s not mine, it’s not mine, I’ll give—…I’ll give it…”

I come unblind and the night is glaring-bright around me. My muscles loosen, but sear like they’ve been bowstring-taut for years. My shoulders slump and my hands cry out, then go numb, and my breath saws rough through my throat. The air’s sweet and needling-cold, like a stranglehold on me has just gone slack.

There are strong arms round me. They hold me back and hold me still.

“Shit!” hisses a voice, hot in my ear. “What’s got into you? Stay still, s’wit!”

“Tal! Let him go right now or I swear—…”

“He was going for the sword!”

I blink till my eyes stream clear. I see firelight. I see a pooling of sack-cloth, and inside it the sword that has shed it like skin. Alfrind’s sword. My stolen sword.

“Please,” I say. My eyes are dry but my voice sounds like weeping. “I need to give it back. They’re so loud – please – I need them to stop.”

“Who?”

“…I need to — I need—…”

Our fire flickers. Beyond it there’s darkness. Light flickers in Atadi’s face. Behind her, the dark spits something out, moving like something just learning to walk.

“Look out!” Talhril’s voice rumbles against my back, where his chest is pressed.

I cry out too quick for my voice to form words. I lurch forwards, trying to struggle free, but already Talhril’s thrown me to the ground, surging to his feet. I sprawl and try to rise against the wet slackness of my whole body.

Their shadows throw pictures of a fight round the fire. One ducks as the other lurches forwards, arms out open, then closing like pincers. Talhril charges it, pushing with a shoulder. It smacks into a standing stone with a noise like live wood splintering – a wet breaking noise – but it flails out with both searching arms again.

I hear Talhril’s snarling groan before I see it hit him. I am on my feet now. I am reaching for my belt. Atadi’s shape comes up again with a long sharp line in its hands. The line for a moment is an arc of silence and motion. Then a sound – meat parted from meat – and Atadi is joined to the shambling shadow by a straight but quivering something: a blade, buried in its shoulder. It doesn’t fall. She lets go, and draws back.

Voices. Atadi’s and Talhril’s. A groaning tree-growth noise — like the mechanisms of a body, all trying to speak, but forgetting the last thing speech needs: breath. And my voice, quieter than the rest, calling.

Josket comes from the smoke of the fire and the shadows beyond it, and rushes from both at once. A long-legged bristle-backed darkness bears the thing to the ground with a growl that sounds like gathering clouds. It tears at the fallen thing in a blur of jaws. And then is gone, leaving only a fluttering wind in its wake, and the taste of raw rot in my mouth. I spit until the tang is gone.

Nothing moves. The three of us stand round a corpse. Its throat is torn to the bone. Alfrind’s sword is buried in it, gone in at the meeting of shoulder and neck, and now stuck inches into its chest. The three of us pant, silent, but all thinking the same thing.

This corpse was one of the seventeen: a week dead, days entombed, but too full of needing something to rest easy. So why did it come here, I ask myself? To get what it needs.


	21. Chapter 21

A dome overgrown with nameless weeds and thick-pelted grass rises here, above the dew and the fleeing drifts of fog that gathered and fell last night. It looms from a kind of valley, cut into the flatlands where Shor’s Stone grew. This is where they bury their dead.

Tusks of tan mean-angled flint jut round the barrow. Some tall as I am, most smaller, these standing stones have painted faces: spirals trailed in white; snakes and stags; goats and crows, daubed in blue. Between them grow nettles and wild ragged flowers. We stand amongst them, still and silent, and looking at the barrow-mound.

It’s like a helmet, or a head, half-buried in the earth. Two nooks look out at us like eye-sockets, each filled with an unlit oil-lamp. Between them a sunken mouth gapes open, sloping down into the barrow’s dark throat. I think I can hear it breathing, or feel it soft and insisting against my face and in my hair. But I know it’s the dead I hear, and their presence I feel — under the earth, in the air, all through this quiet place.

Overhead the sun’s barely risen. Its light doesn’t quite reach down here. We have no shadows, because the whole valley is swimming with shade and cold. Like we left Spring behind when we walked the flint-paved path that brought us here. I cross my arms, and think of Tanet, who stood like this, and always looked so strong doing it. I try to borrow strength from that memory of her.

“We’ll need to go inside, won’t we?” asks Atadi. It’s the first time I’ve heard her sound anything but sure. Her face is stiff and maskish, and her lips are firm-set, thinned and closed.

“Best to,” Talhril says. “Best get it over with. Before we lose our nerve.”

“…Doesn’t seem right though, does it?” Atadi speaks in a hurry, as if to rush the thoughts from her head and out her mouth before she can fully think them. “This isn’t a place for living people, and it’s sure as sand not a place for us – two Dunmer and a Redguard – I don’t like this…Not at all. Maybe we can just—…”

“They’ll thank us for it,” says Talhril.

“Who?” shrills Atadi. “The living or the dead?”

“Both,” I say.

I’m standing behind and between the two mercenaries. They turn to face me, with uncertain eyes. I feel it like a weight all across me — on my brow and on my shoulders; heavy on my chest till my breathing turns laboured. They’re looking to me for certainty.

I fidget my toes in my boots, and my fingers knit, and unknit, mesh, and unmesh. I look them over but avoid their eyes.

Atadi in her crimson-dyed doublet, with tough suede sleeves thick enough to turn a badly swung blade, and metal in plates and scales and splints on her torso and shoulders, fastened with studs between the layers of cloth. In wide trousers tucked into high boots, stitched with crescents of iron over the shins. Atadi with her hair wrapped and covered, a silk sash tight round her narrow waist. She has a curved sword on her hip, knotted somehow into the sash, and she grips it to steady her hand.

Talhril in a metal cuirass, out-angling down its middle like a bird’s breastbone, high-collared up to his sharp jaw. With his shield slung across his back, and his thrusting sword – blade starting broad and tapering to a needle – hung listless in his plate-backed gloves. He has iron up to his elbows, and iron up to his knees. His other hand holds a half-familiar kind of helmet.

They’re both dressed for battle. I’m only dressed to travel, carrying but not wielding a dead man’s sword. Still I tell myself I can be strong. I shift my weight on my feet, across my hips, and tell myself I can do what they can’t. They’re fighters, but this isn’t something they can fight.

“Both.” I repeat it. “I can do it. I can go inside – under it – and give it back. I stole it in the first place. The sword, I mean. I can put them to rest. On my own.”

“On your…On your own?” Atadi breathes the words like a sigh of relief, but they have a new fear in them too.

I nod, and stand firm, still except for the wring and flicker of my hands.

“And what about us?” asks Talhril. “What do we do?”

“Stay here. Watch the door. Watch my path back up, and make sure no-one goes in after me. None of the Nords — no-one — not till things are…Not till I’ve made things right.”

I owe it to the dead. I can hear them – no, it; the one thing, hive-like, that the dead have become here – like a distant roaring, waiting to teem over me. It’s my fault, and it’s my duty to undo it, make it better. I don’t know that I can, or how I should, but I know that I must. And that’s what wisdom is; what a wise-womer does; we hear and do what others won’t.

I walk between Atadi and Talhril. They shift a little in my wake, moving aside to let me by. I tread the path of flat-faced flints towards the barrow-mound’s open mouth, walking soft and deliberate in my new-old boots. I unwrap the rag binding from one of my sleeves and bind a place on the sword’s naked blade to grip it by. As the barrow swallows me, I offer out the sword, grip-first. Not a weapon. A gift.

“Tammunei!”

Behind me I think I hear Atadi’s voice. Then my ears ring thick with silence.

…

_The sky is full of lights. Some moored to the bay, to buildings, sconces, boats and rafts. Some rising up and getting lost, joining the stars._

_“Cup your palms.”_

_“Like this?”_

_“Close. Closer. Close them.”_

_Noor holds her hands over mine. I don’t know how her hands are always so soft, when Nanrahamma’s and Tanet’s are coarse with the work they do. My hands are small, close-cupped in hers._

_“Like that, Tam, see? Like you’ve caught a butterfly — no, better, a torchbug — and you’re holding it. Soft so you don’t hurt it. Tight so it doesn’t fly away. Now the song. Just a few notes, clear, high-ish, like I showed you…”_

_I hum the three bits of sound together so they make the song she showed me._

_“No,” she says it gentle; gentler than Nan would. “Here.” She reaches up one hand, and touches two fingers to my neck, where it’s nearly ready to meet my jaw. “So I can feel it buzz — right here. Try again.”_

…

I hum the small spell Noor taught me. Here in the darkening downward tunnel, a warmth is born in my one closed palm — it sputters to life like a candle-wick taking. I open my hands and let the blue-green flutter of light free. It washes across my weak-smiling face, as it rises up to wander about my head and shoulders. Wan but steady, its shine lights my way.

The tunnel is less like a throat than I thought. It’s broad enough for two of me, and high enough for one, though someone tall would have to crouch — and that’s a small mercy, maybe. It’s ridged with carved steps, but all different depths and different sizes, so it’s more like climbing down a mountain path than walking down a flight of stairs. I watch my footing but stumble twice, brace against the cold dry wall, catch myself before I carry on.

It gets wider, and the air grows colder, the sun further away, until I’m certain the stones I tread have never seen daylight, not even before they were laid here to build the barrow. I’m glad for my sheepskin fleece-thing, draped over my shoulders, down my back, covering my chest.

I forget the day overhead. I climb for lifetimes — of course that’s how long it would take to go down into a place meant for the dead.

…

_The dead don’t disgust or scare me. I know death. Like I’ve known death since I was young, but old enough to help Tanet with her work._

_I don’t fear the dead like I fear dying, or pain — or nothingness; open, awful, emptiness. Not like I fear the cruelty of the living, who are more complicated, more fickle, and sometimes harder for me to understand._

_I know what I am — or what I will be one day. One Who Hears, so let me listen, to learn what’s broken. One Who Heals, so let me mend. And more than that, perhaps; perhaps one day._

_So I’m not afraid of corpses. They don’t disgust or scare me. Nor the dead, nor their ghosts, their voices. I’m only afraid for myself. I have failure in me, always waiting to strike. I have stupidity in me that comes down like fog, choking, blinding. But I know what I am, and what I’ll be, if only I live, and return…_

…

I tell myself over and over. No fear, no disgust – not from me – just wisdom and what that means. It’s a cold coat of comfort, barely there, but helping — it shores me up, if only in a small way.

Usually I have to concentrate, and deliberately listen before I hear the dead. But there are places where they’re so loud I have to strain and work hard if I want to block them out, and get my skull silent so I can hear my own thoughts again, and know that I’m the only one inside myself. Places like Refugee’s Rest; places like this place.

The dead here are one thing in a way they shouldn’t be: one voice that’s gathered them all to itself, to rage and want down here. It sends whispers up the tunnel to me, feeling at the hems of my mind.

_Thief. I see you. Come closer._

The tunnel bellies out into somewhere too big for my spell-light to reach all its walls at once. Darkness presses in on my glimmer of light, and looms huge and oily-thick beyond the limits of my seeing.

The voice is a presence now – all around me; behind and before me – a feeling like gazes, heavy upon me. It rushes in, cold through to my bones, and tries to surge like a tide into my head and hearing.

“Stop!” I shout to the dark and the dead. My voice echoes, twisting back to me, mocking. I shut out the sound of its voice; I think so hard the space behind my eyes begins to hurt. “I’ll listen once you stop trying to force me to hear!”

The dark writhes round me. It rallies shadows at the rim of my light, raising them like hackles. The dead are in it, and in everything I can’t see. They animate it. I refuse to hear them, but I can feel their seething, in gloom that wants to choke me, still and silence me.

“You’re not used to being denied,” I call out, willing my voice not to waver. “You’re not used to being defied. But I deny you. I defy your wants and raging.” I block out the echoes that maim my words, and taunt me by warping my borrowed Tamrielic. “Listen to me. Then I’ll listen to you.”

In response, a new kind of nothing. It rears out of the dark – ineffable; a pulse maybe; a throb of quiet – then settles back. I think maybe it’s open to me now, and to what I have to give. A glimmering of hope starts up in the midst of all the necessity I’ve filled myself with.

“Yes? Good,” I sigh. “I am Tammunei Ereshkigal. You know me – or I think some part of you knows me – but not why I’ve come. I’m not here to harm you or take anything from you, but to make amends.”

I falter. Something is moving in the shadows again. On the far side of my senses, just barely beyond real comprehension, I feel rather than hear the darkness throb. It ripples. The air shifts and thickens like water around me. Josket raises the beginning of a growl behind my sudden-gritted teeth.

The sound’s a shuffling. It coils and uncoils. A rub of cloth on cloth. Or an old book’s pages turning, thumbing over each other. Then comes the creak of bone, and a sound like dust disturbed.

“I don’t know Nordic ways with the dead,” I waver, “but I want to respect them. How can I honour you? Please…” My voice cracks and shudders. “I’ve come with an offering…”

I hold out the sword by its blade, horizontal between my two upturned palms. It lies across the lines that Amarin’s sword left on me, healed now, but still raised in silver-pink. I look over its flat line like a horizon, and see the dark disgorge something man-shaped.

Like last night. Again. It’s happening again. This time the dead thing wears many shapes at once. They reach from the shadows and into my light, shuffling like things just learning to walk. Dressed for fighting, each in their own fashion, with skin tight on their bones and tanned like leather — these are the rest of the seventeen, prepared for the grave by their kin.

Josket bristles inside me, all thorns and fierce-cornered protection. Somewhere else, some other part of me wants to run, or give up, lie down, begin to cry. And then there’s wisdom, which tells me to stand firm, and do what needs doing. I am all three things at once.

Alfrind’s corpse shoulders through those buried with him. His face is drawn and stiff; he looks with sightless eyes and empty sockets. My lungs are numb and my limbs are heavy, but I hold the blind straightness of his gaze with my own sidelong stare. And I show no disgust. And I try to show no fear.

“This is yours,” I say, and turn the sword with shaking hands. Its grip is towards Alfrind’s corpse, its point towards my heart. “Alfrind. I offer and return it to you. Rest – please, rest – safe with the sword that brought your people victory.”

Alfrind steps forward on groaning jerking legs. I wince, but do not flinch or shrink back.

“You died with honour. Rest honoured.”

The corpse stretches out an awkward hand. It grips the sword, looks sightlessly down its blade and to my breast.

“Join your ancestors. Be – at – peace.”

I hiss the words, plead them, snarl them. For a moment there’s only a thick-fallen hush. I let myself listen again. A roaring floods my mind. It washes over but doesn’t drown me. It gives way to calm.

_Thief no longer._

Alfrind’s corpse draws the sword from my hand, and holds it close to its chest. By turns, the rest of the seventeen show me their backs. Barely breathing, I watch them sink back into the dark. And after that? To sleeping, stillness, Sovngaarde maybe — somewhere only Nords know.

In the silence I can hear my heart thunder and drum. I wrench breath into my lungs, gasping, then let it out in something like a sob. My heart slows and starts to calm. I turn, and start to climb the steps once more, ever upward, into the land of the living once more.


	22. Chapter 22

Light steeps the shaded valley. The sun’s in zenith overhead, and blinds me with gold when I come up into the world again. Startled, my spell-light flickers and blinks out. Me and my magic are eclipsed; the air is filled with shouts and spitting jostling voices; and the warm blindness of daylight feels suddenly like fire, wrapped round me, not burning but stifling.

I’m smothered. My eyes adjust. The light gives way to figures. The shouts stagger into sense and become words.

“…down there! Doing gods-know-what to our honoured dead!”

“Our restless dead, you mean! Cursed! You were there when they came in the night…”

“No man should have to fight off cousins like that. Neighbours, kin, plough-hands…”

“…Brothers! Sons and daughters!”

“And we know who’s to blame!” Noises answer: a marl of cheering and dissent. “The one who went down there, last night and now again. The dark elf!” Noise, full of teeth, full of fury turned in and outward. “The one who’s returned to the scene of its sins!”

“Tammunei was trying to help!” Atadi’s voice rings out, piercing through the others like an arrow screams out its flight.

She and Talhril stand back to back, near the mouth of the barrow, near where I stand. His shield’s brought to bear and his sword warns from behind it. She has her blade drawn too, and held at arm’s length — its gleaming threat clears a space round them, and Talhril looks ready to beat back any who might rush in.

But the people of Shor’s Stone crowd forward. They pack the bottom of the valley, mass broken only by the fangs of flint that jut from the ground between them. Some have farming tools brandished like weapons. Some have axes. One shoulders to the head of the mob. Axe in hand, an empty scabbard on his hip, he carries himself with the arrogance of command. The karl, I think — he has Alfrind’s fair hair, though turned pewter with age.

“Your dead came for us too last night,” Talhril growls, staring down the karl.

“If Tammunei’d known that they came into the town too, and in numbers…” Atadi says. Her voice is quieter, less steady, pulled two ways at once. “He’d be doing more. Trying harder. This is not his doing!”

This frightens me more than the risen corpses ever could. More than ghosts or voices or barbed twisting mysteries. More than the dark and more than the dead, I fear these living people. The Grey Quarter taught me what Nords in numbers can do.

I walk silently to stand close between Talhril and Atadi. My gaze is turned low — I don’t want to see the crowd; it’s bad enough to feel all of them seeing me, and my wild hair, my sad face and sudden-blushing cheeks.

“Him!” the karl calls out. From the corner of my good eye, I see him raise a pointing hand at me. “That one! He was with my son and didn’t save him. He used him!”

The mob bristles and surges as if to rush forward. Talhril beats the flat of his sword on the iron of his shield. Atadi casts a sweep with her blade, letting the crowd know it could sink into any one of them if only they’d come nearer. But this close, I can feel the mercenaries are tense, tired; uncertain and outnumbered.

“Give him to us!” the karl bellows. “And you go free and unharmed.”

“Atadi…” I murmur, in a voice too quiet for so many people. “I did it. I helped. Please — why do they want me?”

“Because they’re scum who see race first, and deeds and quality and everything else after,” Talhril hisses in answer.

“You did..? You really fixed it?” Atadi asks me quietly, then shouts to the crowd. “He’s helped, you pig-herding pack of idiots! You should be thanking him. He’s the reason you’ll be sleeping sound tonight, and I swear, the first one of you too stupid to see that — the first one who tries to lay one filthy finger on him — I’ll fucking cut them into messes, d’you hear me?”

The mob bay and holler. I once saw a circle of youths in Blacklight, older than me, on a floating pier of the Tide District; they were jibing and pricking at crabs, sea-shalk, simple beasts, tormenting them till they fought each other out of fear; and I wanted to tell them to stop what they were doing, but they had the taste of cruelty on their tongues, and wouldn’t, even if I’d begged or threatened. That’s how these Nords have gotten — they drive my mind down paths to that memory, like hunters hounding out quarry.

Something flies blunt and sudden from the crowd. Talhril moves his shield and deflects it with a short-lived metallic clang. A stone, thrown by someone in the backmost ranks of the mob. More follow, in a hail of small stones, clumps of soil, cheering jeering voices. I’m hit somewhere; maybe in many places; the pain flares up dull and distant. I shrink from the barrage. I whimper, but the sound only hums in the walls of my skull and the bones of my jaw, and goes no further.

Talhril moves to stand in front of Atadi and me, shield raised and noising with tinny drumming, thinned-out thunder, warding off the rocks and clods of earth.

“You’re with him!” someone shouts — the karl, I think, but can’t quite see. “He’s your brach. In your care. Why should we believe anything you say to vouch for him? Grave-robbers. Necromancers! All of you.”

“Watch your fucking mouth, Nord…”

“What d’you say we have at them, sons and daughters of Shor’s Stone? Let no crime go unpunished!”

The noise of the crowd rises too high for me. I bend to a crouch, curled chest over knees. I fold my arms over me, like a roof, to shelter my overfull skull.

 

_They come to our yurt. They enter without guest-words or visitor’s-gifts. The curtain pulled aside, they bring in the scents and sounds of the world they’ve made – are making – beyond these walls we’ve pitched._

_Smoke, iron, screaming, salt. The tramping thunder of feet; some run, others march._

_“No need for trouble, friends…No need for any of that,” Nanrahamma begins._

_But Tanet takes one step towards them, arms crossed, strength held close to her chest. Then she’s sprawling, struck across her face with the beaked pommel on one of their swords. On her knees, bloody-faced, she curses and spits in words that crackle like roasting fat._

_“Tan, no!”_

_Noor throws herself down by Tanet’s side, hunching over her quivering shape. She looks at me and hisses:_

_“Tam, you know what to do. What I told you to do? Now’s the time…”_

_With tears in my eyes, I hurry through our yurt, gathering small things into my arms and pockets and sling-sack. I hoard up our life here before they can uproot it._

_A flash of pain. A fist grips tight in my hair. A siren-wail starts in my throat…_

 

“Enough!” I howl, and open my eyes.

Atadi has the karl by the wrist. His arm’s raised up, axe taut in his grip, where he tried to raise a hand against her — or against me. But he slumps against her hold, not bearing his own weight anymore. One of his legs is broken-bent, collapsed sideways under Atadi’s boot. He’s bawling too now, not saying words anymore, not goading the mob.

Talhril thrashes at a line of farmer-dressed Nords with an arc of his shield-arm. He roars, daring them closer, warning them off. A line of blood runs down from his brow.

“Enough!” I say again, louder and more stark this time.

I rise to my feet and stride a ways across the churned-up valley-bottom to halt sharp between the two mercenaries. We stand with our backs to the barrow, and the crowd growing like thorns before us. My mouth is dry and my eyes are aching. The colour is high and hot in my face. But I speak to the featureless snowstorm of faces around us, in a voice that burns up from my chest.

“No more blood-shed. Not here, not on this ground. You say that I did things to your dead and set their ghosts loose to make trouble. But here you are, on their threshold, ready to wake them again with violence! I don’t know why I helped you — I don’t know why — not when you’re like this? Hungry beyond your appetite, like wild things, gorging and gorging on death, then blaming the meat and not your greed when the pangs and gut-ache starts! Let it rest. Let them rest. Let us go. Enough…”

The faces stare, open and frozen. At first I think I’ve said something wrong. The words came too raw from my heart; I wrenched their language out of shape, trying to make it do things only my mother-tongue can; I was only making noise, as they’ve been doing. But the crowd is still and quieter now. They fall into a silence that stretches wide and potent.

“The elf talks sense,” a tired voice finally says as heads turn to face him, and the crowd opens channels to see who speaks. The shepherd from the heathlands leans on his crook at one edge of the valley. “Enough,” he says wearily; “I know him. I believe him. Stop picking your wounds, Shor’s Stone. Let ‘em heal…”

A silence blooms, ripe with change and turning. A murmur of agreement goes through the crowd. Relief fills me, like a shuddering sudden weakness that almost turns to laughter.

The crowd parts slowly. They’re more herd now than pack or swarm. Scowling, Atadi lets go the karl’s wrist, snatching away the axe as he slumps, sniffing and shaking, to the ground. Talhril relaxes his shoulders, and lower his shield. They both turn to me with questioning eyes.

“About fucking time we left this hole…” Talhril sighs.

“Offer still stands, Tammunei,” Atadi says, sheathing the axe-haft into her sash. “You coming?”

I nod. I have nowhere else to be. And they stood, didn’t they? They protected me.

We walk with uncertain feet, through the parted crowd and past the standing flints, into the day and the wide openness of the Rift.


	23. Chapter 23

“Does it hurt much?”

“Not at all,” Talhril grumbles, “didn’t I already tell you that?”

“Yes,” I say, dabbing at the cut on his forehead with a rag-sop I’ve made. “More than three times, I think, but less than six — I don’t remember.”

He sits with arms folded stubborn across his chest. I kneel by him, with the rag-sop in my fingers as I try to concentrate on keeping them gentle and careful. It’s small alchemy, small healing – cloth soaked in clean water, wrapped round a paste of pulped ravelbyne, lobster-shell blue – but Talhril insists it’s only a small injury he’s got.

“It was just some peasant – some farmhand – who threw a stone and got a lucky hit,” he says, then hisses as I rub the cut wrongways. “Don’t know why you bother…”

Because, I think. Because you got it protecting me; protecting me knowing it could’ve been worse, you could’ve been hurt worse; but still you stood. Because it’s the least I can do. Because I owe it to myself and to you.

“Sorry,” is all I say. I shrug, and carry on dabbing, working weak alchemy into the cut to clean it, and help it heal.

Talhril either talks a lot or hardly at all. His moods are choppy, and change like a flame to the whims of the wind. There are times when he talks fine well-turned words, nearly delicate. I think of the scrolls and little palm-books of poetry Senvalis lent me from his father’s shop in the Grey Quarter mid-gorge, and find Talhril almost echoes them. Then othertimes, he swears and curses, blisteringly ugly. He spits those words in sudden rage; at me or Atadi; or at anything else he sees as having barbed him — a boot he can’t fasten; a tarnish on his breastplate; a bulge of tripping root in the road. The rest of the time he keeps up a sullen kind of quiet. He wears it like a cloak, to hide in, or keep off conversation.

Still, we talk enough — it’s comforting to speak in Dunmeris, and I think that goes for both of us. Our accents and dialects differ. His is familiar but hard to place. Mine is patchwork as my bloodlines and upbringing: Ahemmusa, Vereansu, half-remembered Blacklight slang and more recent Morayat patois, all vying for primacy. But both of us meet in the middle, in Skyrim, where we’ve each lived too long for it not to mark the way we speak, the ways we act…

 

_I span lifetimes. I contain years beyond the years my blood and bone and skin have known. Through closed eyes turned inward, I see things these two eyes have never seen._

_Multitudes? I contain—…No. I am not full of these things. I am a conduit to them. It opens when I listen. It opens when I sleep._

_“It is coming to an end,” she said. We bound the smallest of our boats together – our coracles and knife-sleek canoes – to make rafts that could stray from sight of the coast. We pitched our yurts on the pitching tides. Together we turned our backs on the waters and lands we’d moved through, and called ours, and called home. With clouds brewing dark above Red Mountain’s restless peak, we crossed the wider waters of the Inner Sea._

_“Home is not earth and water,” she said, “home is where we are.” And where we are is colder than I am used to. And the nights are darker, more empty. My wise sister says this is because the land is dying, even here across the Inner Sea. Soon, she says, a night will come that lasts for sunless days. And I tell myself: Home is here now; home is these plains. I tell myself they are like an ocean, looking out across their flatness, their facelessness. And that makes it more familiar — easier to bear. Or so I tell myself._

_“The winds blow,” she said, “look how we scatter.” We are few now. Not a clan any longer. Only a few guar, learning to graze from new dry land, and three yurts grouped close on the plains. But he is still my khan — the khan who I made khan, to lead his people across the sea, away from their end. And still he is dying. Nan can do nothing, wise as she is, my wise sister always. And I hate her for it — just a little but so much more than I should. He is wasting away. He is what brought our clan together, so aren’t I also what held them, being the one who made him what he is? So — is it also me that made him blight-sick? Soon he’ll be nothing. Let them go. If my hate could follow them; hound against their heels…_

_“From yesterday’s ash-fall,” she said, “today’s flowers bloom.” I say we do what we must. We are not of their clan, but I made us part of it — anything else, and we would have died alone on these unfamiliar plains. We are Ahemmussa still. But we live as Vereansu now; as I lie with one of them; am joined to one of them, for the good of those of us who are left. This Vereansu khan-son, third in line beneath his father…I will close that gap. I will raise him up to keep us safe. I have made one khan before, and can make another again. I can because I must. Though I still remember the taste of Antun’s mouth against my mouth, and will remarry before I forget._

_I am Jemikh. No, I am dreaming. No, I am waking. Yes, I wake._

 

I don’t mention this feeling of owing them both something. All the same, they tell me: “This isn’t some debt you’re working off here, Tammunei. You’re here because you want to be, for as long as you want to be. Right?” And I nod, and try not to blush, because even those words are a kind of kindness my Harrowing has weaned me from daring to want.

I don’t do what I do from some binding obligation. I do what I’ve always done. They fought for me, and would’ve fought on, even outnumbered. So I care for them, and wrap every act of care up in the ambiguity of that phrase: acts of care and carefulness; caring in small heart-pangs, of worry sometimes, but mostly of wanting to help. I do what I’ve always done.

I keep things in order, learning how their shelters work; how different they are from a clansmer yurt. I learn to help pitch them when we set camp.

I keep us fed, carrying the sack of oats we fall back on in lean days, cooking porridge from it when there’s nothing else. As we go, I gather what roots and mushrooms and berries I see. In clear weather I hunt, with the borrowed talons and beaks of hawks or falcons. I sing a savage efficiency into them I haven’t achieved before, as they harry smaller birds from the trees and into my hands, or else rabbits from the Rift’s long grass, then into our pot. I’ve got better; am getting better all the time.

“Your magic’s not the crisping-idiots-with-lightning binding-angry-daedra-to-snip-fools-into-pieces kind, is it?” Atadi says to me one night, while I coax a cookfire out of our kindling, and urge its heat into the pot of porridge hung above.

“Would you like me better if it was?” I ask. “Would it be more useful?”

Her answer comes mostly as laughter. The sound’s an unrestrained one. Not like bells, like in poems and songs — more like ringing metal clang-crashes against metal; like the music a hammer and anvil make.

“Tammunei,” she barks laughing, “if what you do isn’t useful, I don’t know what is..!”

“I haven’t been in many battles,” I admit; “haven’t done much fighting — not with magic or any way without it. I don’t know if I know how but — this? — I’ve been doing this a long time. All my life maybe. All sorts of small magic, ever since I was small.” I give a gasp of half-easy laughter too. “You don’t mind?”

“I don’t mind,” she says, smiling her wide-mouthed smile. “I’m glad it’s the way it is.”

Her smile spreads to me like fire catching. I’m almost more eager than shy. I start to chatter: “I know fishing spells too. Good ones, easy sort of. I miss fresh fish. Will there be water soon? We’ll eat better when there is, I promise.”

She nods. “A lake,” she says. “And a good bit of river too. Lake Honrich, and the Treva.”

We’ve been travelling South since Shor’s Stone, along roads sometimes but mostly through woods and scrublands. Atadi and Talhril seem to know the way, but not always at the same time, or in agreement.

“Oh,” I say. “Good. And then?”

“Riften,” Talhril says, surfacing from one of his silences. “We’re going to Riften.”


	24. Chapter 24

_“On the Inner Sea or the waterways, the best pilot isn’t the most steadfast,” she says. “Not the one who sees the wave or hears the storm, and stands strong in the face of their coming. Their boat will turn to splinters and their bones will feed the ocean-bed, and from them the rest of the world will learn how little wisdom there is in bravery…”_

_Around us the Vereansu mourn a threefold mourning. Khan first, and his two firstborn, all fell fighting._

_Nirumal tells me such deaths aren’t unusual among his people — the Vereansu graze their herds on the plains, and that’s the hearts-blood of their clans, but the beating heart itself is raiding, warring, taking from the settled Velothi who presumed to build in lands that weren’t theirs. What’s strange is to die on the back-foot. The Vereansu are unused to defending; unused to fleeing._

_In the North, the skies grow darker every day. Winds howl, the black clouds belch thunder, spit red lightning. From the South, the scaled folk came, with the taste of murder in their mouths. Their flint-lined sword-clubs and their axe-like carving-maces wear our blood — ours, for we’re Vereansu now, if not of the Vereansu._

_“The best pilot on the Inner Sea’s the one who sees the wave and hears the storm, and rides them. The one who bends so as not to break, and survive the darkness and tumult to serve as a lesson to the rest of us: that there is strength too in suppleness.”_

_Nanrahamma whispers this to me, while the Vereansu mourn, and she stares pointedly at Nirumal. The mer whose heart’s joined to mine now; with his recurved plains bow, and his father’s curved sword; last of his khan-father’s line; heir now to the waiting emptiness of influence, and power; heir to his waiting people…_

 

Darkness roars wide to swallow the firelight. My eyes are closed, my eyes are open, my eyes are mine again. I’m not myself. Becoming myself again is a stretching feeling, overstretched, like cramps and pangs that begin and end in the mind. My eyes are dim, and sandy with sleep. I breathe like a trapped animal.

“The dreams again?” comes a voice from the dark. Talhril’s voice. It grounds me.

I nod, then realise that’s as good as silence in this much dark. “Yes,” I say.

“The Ratway’ll do that to a person. Most aren’t used to sleeping under this much stone, this much earth. For me though? It almost feels like home.”

He pauses. A pause in which I don’t ask him where home is, who he is, who are his people. He’s no clansmer, but beyond that I don’t know, or shouldn’t know, because perhaps I wouldn’t like the answers.

“Got an inkling though,” he continues; “these dreams of yours started before you got here, and they won’t stop when we leave, hm? Condolences, sera…”

“You’re not sleeping either,” I say. “Why not?”

“I don’t — I don’t need much. Besides, someone needs to watch our tails, sleeping in a fetcher’s-pit like this. Thieves. Murderers that’ll string your guts out just for a shot at what’s in your pockets. And besides, we’re being followed…”

“By?”

“Could be anyone,” I hear him shrug. “I don’t — I don’t try to keep track of who might want me dead anymore.” He tries to laugh and it comes out choked. His voices is strained and uneasy. “If I had to bet though? My money’s on the karl’s men. Humans like him don’t take kindly to foreigners who come along and break their legs while they’re in the middle of running their mouth…”

I look over to where I know Atadi is sleeping. I can hear her steady breath if I listen carefully.

“So,” he manages, “someone’s got to stay awake. It might as well be me.”

“Someone’s got to. It doesn’t have to be you. Not every time.”

“…I don’t have much of a choice these days. Blight and damn it, I can’t, even if I try…”

“If I can help..?”

“What?” he hisses. “You offering to take the watch? Sing me to sleep?”

“Yes,” I say. “Both.”

A shock of silence comes from him. In the tempo that would’ve held his answer, I think I can hear his tongue scraping round his gums, searching for it. He snorts another almost-laugh.

“You can do that, then?” he asks. “With your Ashlander magic?”

“I can do a lot of things with spells,” I say, “and a lot of my spells are songs as well – sort of – so…Yes. I can.”

“Please,” is all he says. And all the exhaustion of recent days, and however many sleepless nights, weighs thickly on that word.

I start to sing. High and soft in my head-voice, soothing and lapping like sea-noise, the lyrics are almost words but not quite. To a clansmer, music with words that have direct meanings is poetry. To a clansmer, song is too wide and too strong to be tied down like that. To a clansmer, song that is just sound is almost always magic: resonance waiting to be woven the right way, into a spell that is also a song.

Through the threads of magic I weave, I feel Talhril begin to sleep, like a spider feels shifts in the strings of its web.

 

_A thicket of carpentry, balanced on the hip of a lake: smogged and oily-surfaced towards it but glittering like a mirror on the far side, where it meets the river that’s fed us for days. The water-face is interrupted and unflat, flocked with discarded things. They ooze and reek as they bake in the high bright springtime sun._

_Feathered and fur-lined, stitched with small charms, his hat makes me think of a bird’s nest. It sits over his narrow face and thin jaw, thinly stubbled. He holds his boat’s mooring like a beggar holds the collar on a hound who makes up all his company and half his possessions._

_Atadi talks to him, here on the lake-shore. Money changes hands. We step into his small flat-bottomed boat, one by one. The moment of uncertainty comes and goes as I ease into the balance and footing of it. I’m comfortable with the uncertainty of water. But Talhril grips the sides of the boat and looks grim-faced, sick-faced, all through the crossing._

_“Cheaper this way,” says Atadi. “Less hassle than whatever gate-tax they’ve thought up for those who want to get in by road. Besides, you don’t really see the city that way. Look. That’s the real Riften…”_

_I look up from the refuse-strewn water, and the cleaner wake we leave behind us, punting through the murky rainbows of oil that cover this half of the lake. The thicket looms closer now, and closer with every draw of the skinny Nord boatman’s oars._

_It’s only the second Nord city I’ve seen, and it’s different from Windhelm as sky from soil. A niche carved into the bones of the land, then heaped with blocks of hewn-out stone, edifice upon edifice to stubbornness, Windhelm lingers, slumbering black and hard in the bend of a river. But Riften’s as much a city of water as wood, not just by the lake but on it._

_We pass under a watergate, floating raftlike, moored between two watchtowers that spur up out of the water. The boatman draws in his oars and shunts us along with a pole now, pushing us along the lake-bed. The city’s outskirts grow up around us._

_Houseboats and shopboats, with bows carved into rearing snake-heads, sudden sprays of antlers, and their flanks painted bright but scratched with time. Islands on stilts, tied with webs of dripping tarred rope, moored to a dozen things at once, and all to each other. I shrink into our boat to duck the lines and spars of wood we drift under. Jetties and catwalks, other boats too, drifting like us, selling oysters, selling dredged up pottery, shipping passengers from place to place, to and from the city. It creaks and moans around us, alive in constant motion, like the decks and rigging of a huge ship._

_“Is it all like this?” I ask Atadi, when I find my stolen breath._

_“Mm. A lot of it, in one way or another. There’s Riften-Lakeside and Riften-Landside, but they’re both about as wet as each other. Isn’t that right, Tal?” She turns her head to the boat’s aft to smirk at him._

_He tries to throw her the same kind of face but it comes off more akin to a wince. “Fuck this…” he groans, grey skin looking green-tinted, knuckles white on the sides of our boat._

_“You,” Atadi turns back to me; “you’re doing much better.”_

_“Is that a question? I can’t tell.”_

_“I suppose it might be, yes. I’m just…surprised is all. How’s an Ashlander end up with sea-legs anyway? — Never mind, I should be used to surprises from you by now.”_

_“Is that a kindness? A compliment, I mean?” I grin so the corners of my mouth might distract from the colour in my cheeks. “I can’t tell…”_

 

Around me and unbeating, here’s proof that living wooden Riften still has a cold stone heart. Tunnelled out under the canals and through the foundations of the city’s Landside district, the Ratway sprawls for miles. Frigid brick, waiting dark, walled off from the sky, and the wind’s constant kiss, and the sound of moving water — just like Windhelm. Why did I expect any different?

The drip of water from the seams in these stones is not the flow of rivers or still expanse of lakes, or the hiss and roar of rainfall. Coughing sounds out in the darkness, heard from who-knows how far off. A noise grinds against my hearing: what could be a brawl, or just rats in the walls. Voices travel, but leave the sense of their words behind, so only the shape remains to reach me. Sound echoes and muffles unpredictably here.

It was hard to sleep. It’s harder still to be awake.

I’d rather have slept by the side of a canal, under the stars than here. But Talhril and Atadi are settled folk, and will take a roof over their heads at any cost over living in amongst the elements. And the cost here was nearly nothing: few enough coppers that even I could count them at a glance.

 

_The Ratway twists and turns, but Talhril finds his way like a swallow always knows South. We come to a chamber, shot through with daylight, falling strained from high above. I look through squinting eyes, adjusted to dark till now, and think maybe this was the font of a well once, and that’s why its dome-ceiling hubs round an upreaching shaft that ends in sunlight._

_Talhril and Atadi talk to a boar-like whiskered Nord behind an unwashed counter. I stare up at what might be the sky, willing it closer, longing for fresh air._

_“One room, three hammocks? That’s threepence if you’re cleared out by week’s end. Done?”_

_“Settled.”_

_I steal a last glance at the boar-man, then we start off down a corridor that splits from the round dome-headed well. Maybe it led somewhere before, but now it stops abrupt at a fall of masonry that makes me nervous, makes me think the walls are closer and closing. I don’t want to die buried here. I don’t want to die in my sleep._

_The corridor is lined with doors, all leading into triangular rooms, fit each against the other like rows of gritted teeth. One of them is ours. No door, just a doorway._

 

I’ve stopped singing. Talhril and Atadi sleep soundly in their hammocks. Their breath pans soft to and fro. They both have a tempo, body-rhythms each their own.

I stare into the dark. If Talhril is right, and we’re being followed, what better way to get lost than to lose ourselves here, bury ourselves here? In the dark, under stone, in all this uncertainty of sound. I watch the doorway.


	25. Chapter 25

“…You need something else – different – little thing like you are. Something that’ll work with you, and help you. A giver. Not something that’ll take everything you’ve got just to hold right.”

“That’s a good eye you’ve got, lady! A sword’s got to suit whoever’s wielding it, and they’ve got to suit their sword. Why, there was a time that every swordsman in Skyrim would have one blade their whole life, named and made just for them, and when they died in battle, the sword would die too — broken and buried with ‘em, to serve them in Sovngaarde…”

“And what does that make you, selling second-hand blades? Blade-fixer or grave-robber?”

The market throbs and dins all round us. Above, the sun looms high and hot, casting fever-yellow heat, sunflower-yellow light down on Riften. The clay roof-tiles shimmer with restless air. The city’s canals smell thickly skywards, half-boiled by the Summer day.

Atadi talks to the blade-seller, with his sheets and rugs strewn with knives, arranged with swords. Tarnished and bright; rusted and clean; all old to one extent or another, and with echoes etched into them and carried like stains: all things I know I could feel and halfway hear, if only I was allowed to touch.

“Ffah!” the seller splutters. “Those days are long gone. Used they might be,” he gestures at his rugs and cloths, striped and heaped with metal, “but they’re not antiques, and I’m nothing if not honest!”

“Mm,” Atadi murmurs. “As a two-headed Septim…” She turns away from the weather-faced Nord and talks to me now. “See that edge there, Tammu?” My eyes follow her hand. “That was never meant to be sharpened. It’s a flat-iron shaped like a sword. And that one? It’s been reforged, and not well either. It’d break on you in a pinch, quicker than you can say ‘well, shit’.”

I smile. I like it when Atadi shows off what she knows, what she can do. She works the hidden dishonesties out of things, like turning bad iron into good steel. The seller wriggles a little where he sits; I like seeing that too.

But all the same, I like the hoard he sits amidst. The wide-bladed swords, long as my arm, and with horse’s heads, bear’s heads, the faces of otters and goats for their pommels — ‘pommels’: a word Atadi taught me. The shorter swords, tapered all along their length; shaped like shoulders, waists, then hips, or like vases where a hand would hold onto them. The knives with their storied-smooth wood handles. Even the things Atadi – with her smith’s eye – says are junk, I like most of them, if not all.

“Good eyes indeed,” the seller says, with leaden defeat on his tongue.

“Time to move on, Tammu,” Atadi says. She touches two fingers, gently to my elbow, bare where my smock-sleeves are rolled up. “There’s nothing here. You deserve better.”

We walk on through the market, slowed by the crowds, not tight and pressing, but making us meander. So we walk as if through knee-deep water, not against the tide but part of it.

Here, a stall with its walls made up mostly of hutches and wicker cages sells eggs and live chickens. For extra pennies, the woman who runs it shouts that she’ll wring the hens’ necks and pluck them naked, or give dried grass to cushion the eggs in. Eggs by the dozen and eggs by the half; chickens for the pot. She cries out numbers and denominations, and I tear my hearing away.

Here, a man sells salted fish. Here, a man sells bread. And steam comes from the buns and cobs and loaves, and twists in the sunlight. My stomach growls and curls round itself: a wolf alive and pacing in my belly.

I keep sight of Atadi, worried I’ll lose her, so I follow her close. We’re fed well, but not well enough to be all the way satisfied all of the time. The same for how much we sleep, how much we rest, chasing the runaway skirts of comfort, always. But I’m accustomed to it.

 

_“You still haven’t spent a tarnished bit of your share,” Atadi says. “Not since the penny you gave to Talhril for a hammock. Dubious jewel of The Rift, biggest and busiest markets in the South-East, all round you, and your purse-strings are tight as a—…well, you know…”_

_I feel like she’s poked at a bruise halfway to healing. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s tender. How I’m not good with coins like she and Talhril are. How I’m worse still with numbers, and don’t like to be seen nodding my head to count things to rhythms, and don’t like to be seen fumbling with my fingers to make the numbers real and tangible, tenable, till I can nearly grasp them._

_How Noor told me clansmer have no use for coins – no use for bread or tilled earth – and should put stock in real things, not potential things like money is. And how Nanrahamma said to her that if she had no use for coin then she’d have no use for the dinner it just bought her now would she. And how I was stuck between the two of them; between worlds, states, languages, always._

_So I speak to cover up the rub of it:_

_“I think — I think I haven’t seen anything I liked enough that wouldn’t cost more than I had. Maybe. Is that strange?”_

_“You’re a walking swarm of strange, Tammu,” she smiles, “but that’s not by any means the worst of it. It’s just…self-restraint, is all. Places like this?” She gestures upwards, through the stone ceiling of our rented room, to where the living city must be. “They’re worked out so it’s hard on your mind not to buy anything. Isn’t that right, Talhril?”_

_Talhril spent most of his remaining earnings on drinking the night before this morning, and has a mood now almost as foul as the sickly-sweet reek of honey that seeps from him._

_“…Ashlanders…” is all he says, making it sound like a curse._

_“Still, Tammu, trust me, there’s some things you need. Some things that’re worth the coin. Investments, you know?”_

_She tells me I need a blade. I say I have one, and show her my use-knife, in its sheath on my thigh. Not just that, she says, but like that, maybe, just maybe…_

 

“You could make me one,” I say. “Couldn’t you?”

We sit by one of the waterways, above it on a slow-creaking wooden gantry. And I wish we were down closer to it, so I could take off my new-old boots, and feel the water on my toes, no matter how dirty it is.

“A sword?” she says, like she’s surprised. We haven’t spoken about me needing one since we left the blade-seller. “Yeah…If you find a way to breathe fire and I find a way to shit peat and charcoal, then yeah…”

“I never was very good at fire-calling.” It’s just the truth, but I try to make it sound like a joke instead.

“Mm. And I don’t wanna think about what I’d have to do for…the other thing. So I guess I’d need a forge and fuel and iron instead, wouldn’t I?”

“I guess…” I use her words, and slow to a pause. My stomach growls – or Josket growls in my stomach – and I kick and fidget my feet above the surface of the stillish waters. I finally ask, in a rush that assails the silence: “If you did – make one, I mean – for me – how would you do it? I mean, you said I’d need something that would work with me. Something right for me. Remember what happened last time I had a sword? That…” My face twists between grin and grimace and I wring my fingers together. “That ended well…”

“Mm. You raise a valid point, dove.”

Atadi looks me up and down, squinting through one eye, then the other. It’s an uncomfortable twitching kind of pleasure I feel, with her eyes roaming all across me, appraising. A stupid-hopeful part of me trusts her to see kindly, not judge too harshly, and the rest of me thinks that maybe it’s not so foolish to hope. I look at her sidelong, and stay still like I might if I was being painted, or fitted for clothes.

“A sword to suit you?” She muses. “Well, it’d need to be smallish, slim, with any weight it carries in just the right places…Something to cut with. No, slice with, so that whether you’re strong or not shouldn’t matter so much as whether you’re well-practised and doing it right. A gentle curve. Onsi’s Coals, but I could make it pretty for you…”

She cuts herself off as she begins to drift. My cheeks are hot and a dimly familiar wet redness twines itself round and round in my lower belly. Atadi has looked away and started speaking quickly, in jumps and fits, not dreaming like before.

“You’d need to practise of course. And I’d need to do some learning too — I don’t know the first thing about Dunmeri swords, and Tal’s as good as nothing to study up on that, he goes through swords like I don’t know what, always blunting or breaking them, getting them stuck in someone, moving onto theirs or buying something new next town we see and…”

She breathes in, slow and deep, and carries on more slowly:

“Maybe he could teach you a few tricks, but really you’re best off learning from me. Watching me. No shield to hide behind, and no steel except the sword, you know? Just…what’s up here.” She taps one of her temples through her head-wrap, and sighs, and I may or may not know why.

 

_Her mouth stretches taut and thin. The apple’s a floury soft-fleshed kind and gives in to her teeth without crunching. No broken twig crack. Just the sound of her mouth and the sound of the fruit. She sees me looking, and my ribs cramp, and my palms itch. Wordlessly, she offers me the other half of the apple._

 

In the silence we share, I wonder why I’d need a sword.

To protect me, or else to help me protect myself. But that’s why I made the ghost-trap; why I used it to make and name Josket; so I’d have teeth and claws and bristle-howling hackles on my side, always, and no-one would hurt me again. Josket is many things, but partly it’s an animal-efficient cruelty I keep inside myself, for times when I’d be too soft.

So why the sword? Because Atadi and Talhril want me to be useful to them, by being like them, and shaping me in their image. But I’m not a soldier, and don’t want to be one. I’m already what I am, and will only become moreso with time, when my Harrowing’s done. Wisdom grows like a tree, maybe, inexorable unless it’s stopped.

Still, parts of me admire them, and want to be more like parts of them. Their freedom’s more reckless and selfish than mine’s really allowed to be. They travel to go from place to place, and those places are allowed to be what they are, and not just interruptions on the way to journeying again. Where for me, travel’s the only destination I can ever really keep. And they’re strong, and they make and spend money, and they’re adaptable, fitting and belonging in the world, and making a place for themselves when they don’t. Whereas I don’t.

Atadi and me are walking again. I drink water from a travel-skin, filling my stomach and hoping it’ll forget how hungry I am. And hoping all the more that there might be scraps waiting for me at the safehouse.

Riften is louder and livid by night. Drunks pour in and out of mead-halls, taverns, tap-rooms, and red-lamp houses. Half-wild dogs bark, and Josket weaves a warning circle of instinct around me, so none come close to beg or bite. Somewhere under us, from a grate in the ground, music echoes up, almost drowned out by the stamp of dancing feet. A smash of bottle-glass. A distant drunken sobbing wail.

I hear footfalls in amongst the noise, different because they share the rhythm of our walking. My bad eye has made me good at looking around without seeming like I’m paying attention. I turn my head round and skyward, but glance mostly behind. Someone walks to our tempo along the street-side, in a drape-cloak too warm for the weather. And it may be nothing, but Josket is wakeful and wary tonight, and it’s hard to know where its animal intuition ends and my own suspicion begins.

“Someone’s following us,” I say to Atadi.

“Mm. Someone usually is,” she says. “That’s the way in Riften. Probably just a pickpocket or alley-shark though, looking for something easy.”

“We’re not easy, are we?”

“Shit no,” Atadi says, and puts her hand message-clear on the grip of her sword.

Our footsteps wrap on wood, then cobblestones, then wood again. As we pass on to where Talhril is working, at the safehouse of the Fucked Fingers, our footsteps loose their echo and the other set slips away.


	26. Chapter 26

Cold weather and wet, Simra walked back out under it. His mantle was sodden, soaking through to his shoulders where the wax that proofed it against water had failed with age and use. Half his hair was painted down onto his scalp where it was short. The longer parts hung slack, dripping water down his collar. The wet made his scarf coarse against his neck.

Behind, the lights of the Minu house grew dim and distant. The sky was indigo, obscure as lacquer, a sealed vault of hidden stars. Bobbing at the height of an upraised hand, Simra’s magelight hung above his head. Troughs of shuddering water, a blank expanse of mud between the fields, it lit the dirt path back to Othrenis in the colours of cold firelight.

And toads sounded in the paddies. And the stems and straws leftover by the harvest pattered in the darkness as, slow, they went to rot. House Minu could sit and rest assured behind their walls, warm and dry. All this was good. Well-watered fields, well-fed with the mulch of this past year. But they didn’t have to work in it, walk in it, all but waist-deep in the foul-standing waters; plant the rice and salt the pools. Simra could almost agree with Noor: it’s only indoor folk, roofed folk, for whom rain’s only ever a blessing.

Or was it, at that? Water damages as much as it sustains. What it feeds it can wash away, eat, undermine. Biting flies and sickness, rot in the walls of your home. Simra wondered. Didn’t know enough about farming to know. He’d never stooped to it. Scarce ever stayed put for long enough to watch anything start to grow. The fields lay dank either side of him, abstruse as the sky overhead. And then they gave way.

Simra was richer than he’d been that morning. But still he was hungry. Turned out into the cold, the wet, to sleep beneath a roof of stretched skins and travel on come morning. Eyes on his back from the windows and balconies calling him bounty-hunter, scalp-worker, wanderer — thought of as a needful but distasteful thing, then thought of not at all.

Nothing much changes. The sameness of things leaves its marks on you. A path beaten down across his shoulders where the straps of his bags fit and had always fit and would always fit, invisible to the eye but always there. The harder shares of skin on his hands, burnt and healed so many times they wouldn’t burn any longer. But better that, he thought, than the marks change leaves.

Simra clenched his fists, gathered them under his arms and into the body of his jacket. Walked til the dim lights of Othrenis made muddy the horizon to his left and all the rest around him was blackness.

“Noor? Tammunei?”

He called across the emptiness. His voice was louder than he’d intended; slurred a little on the vowels. For a moment the haze of sujamma lit up in his head and found him ashamed.

“Tammu?”

A worry that became a fear. He turned round and around, squinting into the dark where magelight made him nightblind. The creak of his bag-straps and clatter of his swordbelt were too loud, and the wind was too loud as it picked up over the plain. A moment where he almost panicked. If they’d left him behind…

But where there’d been darkness last he’d seen, he blinked, and now there was light. A fire bloomed. Silhouettes near it and a yurt-shaped shadow.

Simra broke into a jagged run. He was halfway to camp before he realised it, and slowed his pace, and forced his breath to calm. In the last dozen strides he cursed himself for it. Idiot. Here’s what happens. People in your life, Simra – you let them in – and you bear them glad as a gallstone until it seems like they’ve up and torn a way out and only then d’you worry about the hole their leaving’s left. Idiot. Anycase, he was too hungry, too empty, too close to half-drunk to be running anywhere.

He reached the camp. First the light on his face, then firewarmth on his rain-heavy clothes. Simra halted his steps and stood in the glow.

A fire sat sullen, hissing in the rain: a wide and messy thing in a shallow pit, dug a handsbreadth into the ground.

Two guar lay huddled near it and the yurt, with their big saddlebacked bodies and long-bred legs all curled in, made as small as they might be. One slid open an eye and looked at him sideways. Reptile it might be, but there was something more cowlike in that gaze. Trust, as the eye lidded over again, and the guar murmured, and went back to sleep.

The yurt itself had grown a kind of awning. Two spars of wood and bone with hide between them stretched out from its stooped entrance like webbed fingers. Noor and Tammunei sat beneath it, dryish.

Simra looked at them over one shoulder before turning full toward them and bending to get under their cover. The rain beat drumlike above now. He was out of its reach.

“You look drowned,” said Noor. Her hands were in her lap, fingers fussing with cords and threads. She’d been braiding something.

“I feel it,” Simra said. “Drowned, starved. But I got our money.”

Noor’s face changed little at that. Like all he’d said was that it was raining. “Get dry. I won’t have you sick.”

“I’ve had the damp-lung. It doesn’t come twice.”

“A chill, though. A caul on the throat. That’ll come as many times as it pleases, leaving the door open for winter fever. And what then?” A pause as she lent him a serious look. “Get dry.”

Simra lowered his head. Not a nod, but still an admission. She was right. She sounded so much like his mother it put a weight in his throat, his chest. He set to warming himself. Took a long cold breath, and with it borrowed from the warmth of the fire, taking it inside him. From the inside outward, his clothes began to steam and his skin to sweat.

“There’s meat,” Tammunei said, quiet.

“Hm?” Simra’s eyes came open and found the younger wise-one, picking at the frayed hem of their smock-skirts, teasing loose a thread.

“You’re hungry? There’s meat for you. A little.”

“I’d kill for bread, rice, yams…”

“Go back into Othrenis come morning,” said Noor. “Buy your bread with the money you made and you will have done just that.”

Simra snorted, humourless. “If I had a grain of rice for all the times I’d heard that one…” If, if, if — he’d still be hungry, but better fed than he was now.

“Saddle-meat,” said Tammunei, passing Simra a dark strip of jerky.

“From them?”

“Yes.”

They all knew who ‘them’ meant: the dead mer, left two days back on the plain. Whose rations they’d eaten since, and whose guar they’d stolen and ridden; whose ears they’d traded for coin.

“It’s not good,” said Tammunei. “Eat in the dark and you’d think you were eating their boots, not their food.”

“But it’s what we have,” said Simra. Biting and wrenching away a mouthful of the tough meat, he longed for spices, vegetables, sauces… “Saw skewers, riceballs, fried dumplings in Othrenis today. Ghosts and bones but I could go for one of those. All of those.”

“Why didn’t you?” Tammunei said. “Then, I mean?”

Simra chewed, waited impatient til he’d swallowed to speak. “Knew where I was going by then. Didn’t want to waste time. Things were ideal I’d’ve gotten to and from the Minu estate before darkfall, but things scarce ever are, are they?” That was half a lie. In truth, with money on his mind, he’d forgotten.

“You’ll go tomorrow?” said Tammunei.

“I’ll see what I can get, yeah.”

He was richer than he’d been that morning, but it was money he could scarce afford to spend. Not with passage to buy, supplies to pay for later down the line.

“Twelve drams, thirty-three shils,” Simra murmured, though they’d not asked. Twelve glass coins strung round his neck and the rest clattering, a load of copper and iron and tin, in his purse.

“More than you thought,” Noor observed.

“A little. I turned a few tricks for the extra.”

“You don’t sound happy,” said Tammunei.

Time was he might’ve answered true. I’m not, he’d have said; I’m worried, laced tight with all this. But that was when Simra and Tammunei had been alone. Before Noor.

“It’s fine,” he said instead. “It’s enough.” And the word was bitter with a childhood taste: a diet of roots and groats and millet, and his mother saying it’d suffice.

The sameness of things struck him. Sameness and change. Time was he’d have turned in the bounties and spent two days feeling rich. Drunk, walled in and warm, eating, writing. Aimlessness is cheap, he thought; it’s having goals that costs you dear.


	27. Chapter 27

We’re staggered together, loosely clumped. Like a herd of goats, sensing something on the edges of their hearing, just beyond sight, clotting and packing against whatever the night might hold but hide from them: what wolves, what jackals; wild-dogs and foxes. Uncertain, we wait.

Are the others so uneasy?

There are twelve of them with us. Chosen fighters from the ranks of the Fingers, dressed in soft leathers, padded jackets, hard-knuckled gloves. Steel-shod sticks and iron-tipped cudgels; lengths of chain and boot-sheathed knives and hatchets; carpenters’ and butchers’ tools — they’re all armed, with wicked things held in their hands, hung from their belts.

We stand at the heart of their not-quite-formation. Talhril is armed and armoured, with sword and shield and plating, and a grimly distant look on his face. I haven’t seen him this way since the Shor’s Stone barrow, the whole force of him tied up in a detached kind of focus. Atadi stands with part-bent legs, dressed in her part-scaled doublet, with her sword held firm in her sash. She steals glances at Talhril — like she’s worried he’ll disappear, like a good dream might.

Fingers and friends, they’re all dressed like fighters, poised like fighters, half-sprung and ready. But I stand clumsy, in the midst of them, standing out like a stone in a sack of rice.

My failings dawn slow on me. Not dressed like them, but more for travel, in my tight-belted smock, and comfortable boots. Feet too close together, back too straight, limbs too rigid for fear of being caught out or coming unbalanced. My arms are held close to my body. In front of my chest, I cradle my ghost-trap tight. I feel the dry bone, the smooth wood, the red twines of woven hair, all round its flinty heart, and the spirit it holds and the bond it keeps strong. I tell myself it’s as good as steel in my hands. Over and over I tell myself, trying not to leave room for doubt.

I can’t be still. The wind is restless, teasing locks of hair from the knotty braids and nestlike bun I tried to work it into. A strand worries at the corner of my mouth and sticks part-damp before the breeze flicks it away again. My fingers fidget and my eyes wander, one clear-sighted, the other only dealing in blurs, shadows, silhouettes. I see the grey cloud-fleeced sky, and the lake as I’ve seen it so many times now: furrow-faced with wind, grey with first-light.

I’m not a warrior. I’m not a fighter. Why stay when I could flee?

“Not long now,” says Nekkal through the silence. “They’ll be here. Any minute now.” He stands in his apron, scalp newly shorn and shining, at the head of our herd.

No, not herd. Pack. We are wolves, pawing the limits of our territory, scenting the air, watching the wind. We are waiting.

 

_“I think it’s what he needed,” she says. “This turf-war. What we needed. It’s what we do, after all, what we’re meant to get paid to do. Not this fear-mongering and bully business he’s got tangled in. I mean, really — night-work, snapping people’s hands when they can’t pay their debts, to put the fear of the Fingers into them. But this..? This isn’t honest work either. But it’s — it’s closer, Tam, isn’t it..?”_

_We talk in whispers, me and Atadi, over the sound of Talhril’s snoring._

_He came back to the safehouse, sweat still drying on his skin, covered in exertion, caked with dust. Lip split in two places, gait strange like his leg suffered something. He fell into his hammock, and into something like sleep, born of exhaustion but better than before._

_Riften is a land divided, with borders that shift each day, like seams in a sheet too often mended. In name it belongs to the Hold and its jarl, but its streets belong to the gangs who run them by night. Hundreds of small tribes, like the Fingers, all with their territories, signs, hallmarks, fighting day by day for territory and bragging rights. Something about this is familiar to me, but in the indistinct way that makes me think it’s a remembering from before I was born…_

_The Fucked Fingers have been stretching themselves, expanding their borders. They grope from out of the Beggar’s Hedge and into the docks, toward the water, into the territory of a gang that call themselves the Bore Flies._

_“He’s been fighting their battles for them,” Atadi says. “Almost like the old days.”_

_I look up into her eyes. Corners lined like birds-feet, with their sea-silver irises. And I see what she really means: ‘almost like he’s come back to us, almost, almost, from a place I couldn’t follow, not until now.’_

_She’s still talking. She talks more when she’s uncertain or nervous, whereas I talk less or not at all. “…Just soft-play so far. Flyting that keeps whole streets awake with the shouting and jeering. Skirmishes with cudgels, boots, fists — no sharps, no edges, no steel, not yet. But there’ll be a decider, he says, and soon, and I—…”_

_“You want to be with him,” I say, “fight with him. When the time comes.”_

_“The money’s good,” she says weakly. “We’ll be out of the Fingers’ pocket. Out of Riften, back on the road. We can pay off whoever’s after us, make our own way again, whatever we want and—…I want him back, Tam. I want him back and I want things back to how they were.”_

_My lungs are tight and awkward, and my lips are thin and sore. Hearing her talk makes my muscles ache. Looking at her face, unformed by the shadows, unknits my insides and knots me up._

_She and Talhril have hardly spoken for nearly a month. I’ve seen it wear on her, like she’s hungry but not feeding right, just wasting to less than she was._

_And I’ve wondered why I stay. Why I don’t just leave – them, it, all of this – and start again on the long way back to Windhelm, to arrive in Frostfall, and finish my Harrowing..?_

_Because. My heart moors me here. It’ll hurt too much to untie it. I don’t dare._

_I muster a smile. “Me too,” I say. The effort cracks my lips. I taste blood._

 

Summer has deepened. Thick and sticky now, its heat has soaked into the fabric of things, and warmed the water through, spawning mists of biting midges, swarms of droning flies. They’re smaller than in Blacklight – the sea-lice and suck-moths that came from the waves there in hot months – but that only makes me more wary of them. Every itch could be something crawling on my skin. I feel unwashed, skin smeared and too coarse, hair stiff and abrupt like a fox-brush.

These are the hinterlands, between what the Fingers have and what they want. Behind us looms the Beggar’s Hedge: blank-faced serries of cell-sized apartments; clap-boarded shopfronts; shoulder-width alleys running deeper into the territory. To our left and right, warehouses squat, with gangways sloping from their hefty doubled doors, down into the wind-creased water. Jetties, piers, and the lake itself spread ahead.

Something isn’t right. We’ve been waiting too long, but all in silence. The Fingers haven’t started to talk amongst themselves — they stand, waiting and sweating, with only Nekkal saying, for the hundredth time: “Soon. Any second now. Soon.”

A clutch of men and women gather ahead of us. They seep from the woodwork of the docks and warehouses, and gather to mirror us. Dressed like the Fingers, and just as silent, the similarity jars and grinds in my head. Wrong. Where’s the heckling, the cursing and hurling of insults? Something is wrong.

“Atadi..?” I murmur.

She looks at me with questioning eyes.

Nekkal gives a nod. The Bore Flies standing opposite move as one. They have crossbows in their hands. I feel their aim on me. My skin crawls and my body slackens. The Fingers part formation round us, and suddenly their weapons are drawn too, held out towards us.

A whine starts to form in the back of my throat. I want to run, I want to call Josket, I want to taste blood, fight like a cornered thing, I want to run, I want to run, be anywhere but here, be anyone else but me. The animal panic I’ve come to know rises up as my eyes dart round. I take in the circle of fighters around us; the crossbows trained on us; Atadi and me, rooted where we stand, hands longing for our weapons.

Then the panic falls slack as well. Helplessness fills the lack it leaves.

I see Talhril step aside too, weapon and shield hung heavy in his hands. Not looking at us like the others, not ready to fight us. Just not standing with us either.

 

_They crowd in. They beat us with blunt things. The hilts and pommels of their daggers. Their cudgels and clubs and sticks. They bear us to the ground and start kicking. We don’t fight._

_I reach out for Atadi at first. She thrashes on the ground while someone takes her sword from her. She kicks out and takes three kicks in return. In her ribs, her back, her arms and sides. She curls up eventually, like a tortured insect. I do the same, arms over my head, knees up into my body, while the stampede surges over me._

_I realise I’m screaming. Or is that Atadi, howling with rage. I didn’t see Talhril, don’t know where he is now. My screams die off into ragged sobs. Pain courses through my body, now here, now there, in bursts like shattering noises, flashes of light that blind my senses._

_I am curled in on myself, protecting something from the blows. Not my head, not my body, but the ghost-trap, still intact, caged up in my hands, held close to my chest._

 

We sit in wet darkness, with a stripe-broken round hole of light above us. Atadi shrieks up at it sometimes, like a wolf howling at the moon, until she loses her voice and falls silent again.

Sometimes voices drift down to us. They’re the closest thing I have to an anchor in this forgetting-place they’ve put us in. For the dark’s too constant to judge time, and Atadi’s too maddened by grief to speak, or see me, cowering here with her.

“…Fuck does it matter? Someone’ll pay for ‘em, that’s all. Little Red especially. Other two are salt and pepper on top of that.”

“D’you not wonder who though?”

“Not if I ain’t paid to. Learn to do the samewise and you’ll go far.”

“Heard it was some pack of finders from out of town. Working for some country karl or something.”

“And what?”

“Bet they’re getting paid better’s all. If they’re fixin’ to buy them two from us, and still be happy as a pig in shit. That’s all.”

Not this, I told myself. Never again. Not chattel, bound to be sold and bought. Not like this.

Shapeless worthless time passes.

I hold myself together round the familiar shape of my ghost-trap. I have it still, hidden by all my cowering, and not looking like any weapon these dirt-gouging settled folk have seen before. It’s an anchor for now.

While I wake, I can feel Josket with us in the dark: it paces, taking worse to being caged than even me. Its wildness comforts me, makes me feel safe and almost strong, to share in my sivami’s simmering restless rage.

While I sleep, I am everywhere but here. In my dreams, I’m afloat on the sea of what has been, adrift on tides of memories that predate me. The Ghostline is a solace now, and holds less fear than it did.

I think I’m waiting. I remember Darkwater Crossing, and the root-cellar, and know now what I didn’t know then. Something is coming. Something is always coming.


	28. Chapter 28

_She’ll share, perhaps? Knowing me, feeling for me, as she does or as she did. Perhaps she’ll let me close enough to take only enough. Please let me silence my need, Atadi, it’s deafening now._

_I crawl over on splayed fingers and balled feet. Into the start of uncertainty, and the limits of the light. And for a moment we’re face to face._

_I long to see some spark in her eyes. Recognition, apology, grief? I reach out for a shred of gristle-lined bone._

_Atadi’s face twists, wild and harsh as the hurt that broke her. Something arcs out from her uneasy crouch. Her nails are sharp and my face is hot, then suddenly hurting. I stagger back, holding in tears, and wrap myself in dark again._

 

Scraps fall wet and hollow-sounding from the hole above us — where faceless voices fell from before and will fall again after. Splutter and smack, they fall into the pool of dimmish light the opening casts into our pit.

The cold hard rinds of cheeses; the scraped and gnawed bones of other people’s meals; vegetable trimmings and fruit cores. Dejected they lie in the one place solid and visible here. This is a place to throw things worth forgetting. And it’s easy to forget or never find out the width between its slick cold walls, when everything’s darkly formless, except this single stable pool of light.

Damp and up-trod dirt, tablescraps, and I can’t look anywhere else. My stomach recoils and growls at once, fighting against itself and what I know comes next.

Atadi struggles from the shadows on the light-spot’s far side. She blurs into view, squints into the dark, and I almost think she sees and knows me. But her eyes are so unfocused still, rimmed with red and dried-blood black. She gathers up the scraps, and begins to jackal them down, as if scared something will come to steal them if she’s not slaughterfish-swift in eating them all.

I don’t want to look. Still crouched against the far wall, beyond her sight, I close my eyes. But I can still hear her teeth, scratching on bones as she chews them bare, and hear the sour hasty breath of her hungry mouth.

This betrayal’s like a wound in her. First she was wild with the pain of it. Now it only festers, and she suffers silent and docile. I know with my healer’s knowing that a wound on the mend needs feeding in order to heal. So I deny my whining belly and let her eat for two. And I hope that when she’s fully healed, she’ll be herself again, and not what I won’t let myself see.

I retreat into hunger. My appetite’s grown still and hard, inert as stone, till my stomach forgets and thinks starvation is a kind of sustenance. I retreat into myself, slowing to something almost like sleep. Like my Winter spent under the thunderstruck tree, dreaming myself warm. Like my span in the root-cellar beneath Darkwater Crossing.

Somewhere, sometime, the Ghostline finds me. On currents of remembering, it carries me away.

 

_The pass howls with changing winds. They cry and bellow, round the rock, in our travel-clothes, in our hair. And every step is like swimming, made slow by the wind, made slow by our years-long journey._

_The harness-chimes of our guar rattle and moan, and the beasts croak and murmur amongst themselves. As if they know they’re being led away from the land they’re bred for. Big plains guar, with long sturdy legs and a sidling gait, long tails for balance, humps and dells on their shoulders forming a natural saddle for the Vereansu who ride them. Herd guar of the kind more familiar to me, smaller and rounder, with good meat, smooth skin, thick bones good for crafting. Our herd’s grown small, and even the proudest Vereansu among us have dismounted to weather this way through the mountains._

_But we are Ahemmusa, we three, of the coast and tides and islands, and these mountains are just as alien to me. We are Ahemmusa, despite my Vereansu husband, my Vereansu child. Just as they are Vereansu, despite the fate of their clan, tearing itself apart._

_We are all ourselves though mingled, like many-sourced waters join into one river. Settled Velothi, clansmer of all kinds; our families, our herds; our goods and our memories. All flowing together, through this pass. All ourselves, even in this new land._

_For our home will have us no longer, no matter how we long for it to take us back._

_The pass spits us into the jaws of a forest, too thick to remember through. We learnt by hard learning what roots and fruits and grubs were safe to eat. Our way is uncertain in every way but its ending._

_Beyond the forests lay a valley-basin, too wide to see across, even from on high. Veined with deep broad rivers, paddied with floodplains. Here was something more familiar to me, to us, to we three Ahemmusa. The basin saw we were orphans, opened itself out, embraced us._

_I am with child again._

 

“Tam..? Tammunei? Tammu, please..?”

A body is flush against mine. A voice is hot in my ears, and the words it speaks leave a flush of moisture in the conch-like maze of cartilage there. It urges me back into my body from strange outreaching depths. There are arms around me, a cheek against me, fingers rubbing feeling back into my hands. Breath catches noisy in my throat.

“Thank the gods!” rasps the voice, like it’s rusty with disuse, dessicated. “I came to – and you – I found you there like this. Still as a stone and sitting. Curled up like a baby but hardly breathing. For who knows how long? I thought, Tam, I thought…Thank all the fucking gods…Thought you were dead. They weren’t going to take you, Tam…”

My eyes struggle open. It’s hard, like wrenching to part an oyster shell, till the pressure breaks and the seal cracks clear. By the time I can see, I’m half-blind with light: open, enormous; pervasive and penetrating.

“Atadi?” I murmur through the bright white pain.

“It’s me,” she rasps hurriedly, “it’s me, Tam.” Like she knows she’s been gone, needling me with her absence.

“Oh,” I try. “I’m—…Oh…”

Heat spills over my face, and soon our faces share it, tears smearing between our close-pressed cheeks. It’s hard to tell who started it now.

“We’re—…” Atadi gives a barking sob of laughter that eats up the sense of her words. “…—A fine mess. Fine mess we’ve got into…”

I feel her warmth and the hard jut of her bones under my panicked hands. I feel her chin jab into the soft give between my neck and collar-bones. Her fingers pin too hard into my back, and I can feel bruises in every touch. But this is her, not the creature she was: Atadi, healed, not broken. And I think maybe this is more joy than my body remembers how to feel.

The pit-cell comes back to me. The daily scraps; the pool of dim light; the voices coming down from above, talking about us like animals. The docks return to me, slow and painful. The Fucked Fingers, Nekkal, Talhril; the crippling glare of aimed and cocked crossbows; the stab and dull ache of fists, boots, clubs. Then the darkness, and now this glare.

“A mess,” I agree, with a voice rough and dry, tasting bitter in my mouth, eyes squinting. “But…a different mess?”

We’re moving. The ground beneath us is unsteady and unsolid, not dirt but wood. I fight and strain till I can see. We’ve traded the pit for a cage trussed onto a set of cart-wheels, oil-cloth stretched over the topmost bars. Even through the canopy, the sun is bright and hot. Atadi and I are crammed together in the bottom of the cage.

“See for yourself…” Atadi says, quietly.

Her eyes and cheeks are sunken and grey, and her lips are thin. Her head is like I’ve never seen it before: unwrapped, and crowned instead with a short-cropped halo of tight dark twists and curls. Her skin is sheened with grime, and mine prickles and itches so I know I’m no better, no cleaner than she looks.

“We’re filthy,” I think I hear myself saying, stupid as a sleepwalker, or a child half awake.

A mule labours with plodding steps in front of the cage-cart. A dirt-road passes slowly by on each side, and fields move slower and wider still, heady and blurry with the day’s heat. It’s still Summer then, though I feel like months have passed in darkness. My stomach roars with hunger.

The bars clang and ring near my head. I scramble and sprawl away from the noise, springing apart from Atadi, but only by inches: the cage is still too small to get far.

A smallish stone-faced man walks alongside the cage, hatchet poised to beat against the bars — he’s done so once, and stands ready to do so again.

“Quiet in there!” he grunts, in a thick accent I haven’t heard before, then stalks away on soundless feet. “And have some fucking decency. Crawling all over each other like snakes…”

I look at Atadi again, wide-eyed.

“They sold us,” she whispers. “The Fingers. Before they even threw us in that pit, Tam. That was just till this lot were ready to come collect the goods…”

There’s exhaustion in her voice, in place of the usual fire. A knot tightens in my chest. This is what I felt coming, and waited for, in vain. What starts as resignation grows and spirals into panic.

Never again, never again; this is the reason for my sivami; this is why I made the ghost-trap; so that never again would I face this, never again. Josket. Where is it? Cut off and separate. A solid sense of loss, like a phantom limb.

My hands are wringing on each other, empty around each other. I feel the start of a hollow whimper in my throat. I pat and claw and scour all over myself, through the filthy torn folds of my smock.

“Nothing,” I force out. “They’ve taken it.”

The ghost-trap is gone. My panic soars. It rises like birdsong, turning and turning, when the flock’s alarmed and takes flight. This terror, helplessness, nakedness, uselessness. My broken best efforts. The words are a whirlpool; my thoughts turn white with foam.


	29. Chapter 29

_“At first we thought the land was wild. Simple and stark, competing against itself, dancing circles of survival inward and round, like the lands we’d always known before their end came over them. Before the year of long nights and flaying dust-winds with Blight following in their wake. The Red Year. Child, we thought wrong. While our homeland cast us out amid its dying throes, this land was at war with itself. A mannish chaos, not a wild one. Yet it’s what lets us live free, so where’s the rub in that?”_

_Nanrahamma has Beralu – my child – on her long-skirted lap. I always envied her gift with stories, spinning anything into a tale worth telling, or at least enough to keep a child’s eyes wide and their mouth tight-shut. And sometimes I wonder if, despite the child I’ve borne and the next that’s on the way, she’d have made a better mother._

_The sun is bright and pale in this land. This is the only time of day when the light reminds me of home. There it was red with dust. Here and now, the sun is dust-coloured with the shade of evening. And Nanrahamma dandles my child, telling the story of our years here as if it were an old legend and not new-spun, combing Beralu’s fine charcoal hair with her crafty smoke-stained fingers._

_Our guar graze for weeds and hardy shoots in the burnt and plundered scalps of a paddy-field. There are still boot-prints amongst the shorn-down shoots from where a company passed through days before. The herd waw and yawn to each other across the flatlands._

_Breeds for livestock and for riding, they’ve both multiplied and fed well since we came with the other cast-aways, over the mountains and through the pass: a rag-and-bone horde out of Kragenmoor. But we’ve split up and outwards, till now we’re almost a clan again, mixed in heritage, smallish but tight-knit. We live as we were meant to – as clansmer – off the waterways and plains of the Nibenay._

 

When my head is empty, the Ghostline floods in. When I sleep it gives me dreams to fill the darkness. And when fear and panic take me, and my head fills with noise and then nothing – like a body voiding itself in sickness – it rushes in to fill the lack.

Is it ancestral kindness then? When it hurries to wrap me up and close off everything outside itself, like a parent swaddles their child, crying at the night’s bitter cold? Maybe. Or else it’s a kind of hunger it suffers. The memories it’s made from starve to be remembered. So they come over me and make me remember. Perhaps.

I dawn into my body again. Into my unwashed hide, my thick coarse hair, my aches and healing bruises, and my growling starving stomach. Into the rocking cradle of the cage-cart, and under Atadi’s hood-eyed gaze.

“Alright?” she whispers.

“Are either of us?” I murmur back, rubbing at the tangled muscles of my neck where I rested awkward on it.

I’m tired and torn in pieces, and my thoughts are scattered. But Atadi has a kind of eager energy in her look now. It seems almost like hope, and I wonder where she found it, in amongst all this drowsy heat and cage-cramped shame.

“You were doing it again,” she finally says, weighty-quick, like she’s been holding it back but can’t anymore. Are there questions in my eyes? Maybe so, because she explains. “Spirit-walking, lost in visions. Dreaming. Whatever it is you do…”

“I think so,” I say, nodding.

“Well? Did you? I mean, did you see anything?” She lowers her voice to a pointed eager hiss. “Something useful?”

That’s her hope then: that some prophecy might come to me, and tell me a way to deliver us both. The untruth of it aches inside me, but comforts her. I look into her sudden-wide eyes, and over the up-quirked corners of her dry skinny mouth, and I lie.

“Maybe,” I say weakly.

It doesn’t nettle at me like I feel it should. Perhaps it’s the way her mouth splits and widens, and sets her eyes to dancing, like the sea excited into eddies. Or perhaps it’s that I’ve been too long amongst Westerners and humans. Because isn’t this something they do all too often, like a ritual that ties their society together? They lie to each other, in small but comforting ways, and call it civilization.

It doesn’t nettle at me. But still, it leaves a bitter taste, and makes me long instead for a truth to tell her: that I have some shadow of a plan.

 

_My arms ache, but the ache is whole and fulsome, somehow hale. The forge-fire throws out heat to fill the gloom of the small space we share. It breathes, I breathe, Atadi labours, breathing heavy too. Together we make a tempo._

_Atadi works with tongs, hammer, glowing streaks of metal. They’re only horse-shoes – or not even; not yet; horse-shoes in waiting – but she makes the metal sing. Bright-sounding spark-sounding burst. Longing warbling ring of change. Then the finality of its drifting fade. A three-fold song with each stroke of the hammer and brace of the anvil._

_And I know without always knowing why, when I hear a song like that, it’s best to listen and learn. It’s what Nanrahamma taught me. Before she’d teach me to work magic, she taught me to listen out for it: the songs that shape the world._

 

I raise my throat-voice high at first, till I find the right pitch, and strike it. It’s a high fiery-snapping trill, almost but not quite throbbing out into my mouth. I contort it, controlling, and it sinks back into my throat where it hangs like a bell-toll. I encourage it to fade, seeping into the world, so my singing slips into its song.

I hold the bars of our cage, and press my forehead to the metal. In my hands and through the bone of my skull, I feel it ring and tone as my voice wakes it. I listen in a moment of silence, to see how they relate. Then I start the three notes again, singing in my throat-voice, feeling it in my grasp. But it’s not a spell — not yet.

“Shut your mad pet up!” groans one of our captors, and beats something hard against the cage from where he’s riding on top, holding the mule’s reins.

“I can’t stop him when he gets like this,” Atadi snaps back. “Got to let him ride it out or he gets restless. Violent sometimes.” She makes her voice gentler, more vulnerable now. “Please. Let him be for a bit..?”

She’s played her part well already, in my plan that isn’t a plan. We haven’t been able to speak of it, even in whispers, for the same reason we’re filthy, cramped, sleepless — we’re too exposed; they’re always watching. But Atadi knows I have something in mind. And I thank every voice on the wind that these men haven’t seen this kind of magic before, and mistake it instead for a small sign of madness. And perhaps that’s where it came from, after all: the outer brinks of my panic, driving me to undo its cause.

They take it in turns to ride the cart and urge the yoked mule onward. Another walks by the cage’s side. The last scouts the path ahead, and cuts into the trees, keeping watch and keeping their way.

A matt-bearded Orsimer with a bone-studded brow and a great sword, not iron, tall as me, too long to sheathe and carried instead. A Nord woodsman with a longbow, a long nose, who sniffs at the air like a dog, like he can scent our way through the woods. And the stony-faced Breton with the two jut-chinned hatchets, kind to the mule, keeping it plodding, but wary of us. I know his kind: not watching with suspicion so much as searching for a reason to punish one of us; like a man who needs cruelty as much as food and drink.

Three of them in all. I tell myself: they will not have us. But I wonder, how many days left till the journey ends, and this desperate glimpse of hope is snuffed or forced to change? No need to find out.

I know nothing about locks, but time in Atadi’s borrowed smithy taught me a little about iron. With time, I’m learning my way through the metal, divining out weaknesses, and feeling towards the lock of this cage. I have time. I only need an opportunity.

The cage passes through forests now. Thick new-leafed limbs of sycamore and evergreen brushes of cedar arch over the dirt-road and give us some shade from the harsh Summer sun. I feel the emptiness where Josket should be, between each tree, and in all the soft constant noise of the woods. I should feel my sivami there, but don’t, or else it’s out of reach.

An opportunity. I have time. I only need to find the right instant of it, like finding the right pitch to make the magic rush out. For now, I simmer my song down to a hum — like exploring the metal with only my fingertips, barely there, but I feel it still.

 

_I remember how stark a single tree could seem against the flatness of the Deshaan plains. How the Vereansu tied them with flags and scraps of cloth, and how Nirumal told me that each rag was a wish or remembrance, carried to their ghosts by the wind. I remember how stark the masts of the settled-folk’s tall boats were, when they strangered their way across our waters._

_That is how they look: these men on the ridge over the paddie. Mailed in fish-like scales, quilted leather, with tall tapered helms and painted kites of shield. They sit astride horses, with lances in hand, and pennants like the prayer-flags of the plains twisting from near their tips._

_“They’re watching us,” Nanrahamma says, her story swinging abruptly closed._

_“Not for long,” rasps Nirumal, seizing up his recurve bow and sword._

_He did the same when the lizard-folk came, to feed like flies on our dying homeland. And I told him then: “Wait. This path has claimed three before you. Your father and two brothers. Wait. There are some foes you can’t fight and win.” He leaps onto the back of his plains guar now, and coaxes it into being ridden, heeling the tender-spots between skull and neck._

_“Tune of my heart, wait,” I say cautiously. “Didn’t I make you cleverer than this?”_

_He gives me a look that pierces like arrows, and speaks of how disgusted he’s grown with me, in all my attempts always to shape him beyond himself into something better. My bile rises and speaks inside me: turn then, turn from caution, and the wife that made a khan of you._

_“Look,” Nanrahamma says. I follow her pointing finger with my gaze, as Nirumal’s handful of warriors arm like him, and mount like him, with spears and swords and bows and guar-hide shields._

_On the ridge, one of the men has drawn back the string of a shortbow. He sights and releases._

_“Shields!” bellows Nirumal._

_The arrow is fluted. It screams and whistles as it turns in flight. There is a hanging moment of dread and almost pleasure. Then it strikes into the soil by Nirumal’s feet with a sound like a butcher splitting a joint._

 

I am not, I am not, I am Jemikh but myself, Tammunei, these memories are not mine. But I saw the bolt through them – through the whistling arrow of that vision – even before it flew. The Ghostline rushed to warn me, and made me ready. It’s an instant of clarity before the chaos comes.

Several long strides ahead of the cart, down the dirt-path, the Nord drops his bow to clutch at something with both hands. A stubby stiff-flighted shaft bristles from between his fingers, pressed tight and shaking to his flesh where throat meets chest. Blood follows, gurgling lazily from the wound. He staggers and waivers, as he tries to stay standing.

Someone shouts a curse. Or else it’s a roar, or a war-cry. All I hear is Atadi, hand clapped sudden to my shoulder, voice hissing in my ear:

“Now!”

I start my song. This time, the magic flows. It rushes with clean and surging feeling, like waters that’ve been waiting, finally undammed. White-knuckled, I grip the bars of the cage near the lock, and urge my spell into the metal.

A shape hurtles from the tree-line with a sound like coming thunder. I see the charge before the horse and rider. It crashes into the stumbling Nord, and tramples him into the dirt. Bones splinter, the body twitches, then lies still and tied in an awful knot.

The horse rears, crying out, hooves wheeling in the air as if in horror. The rider slips out of the saddle rather than fall, and lands with a metallic thump. He hunkers into a fighting crouch, behind a shield like a crab’s crushing-claw.

I raise the spell to crisis, song taut, then let it go. Metal buckles and twists under my hands. Rust blossoms out like rot from wood and moss from bark. I look at the lock with one hungry hopeful eye. It screeches and moans, and somewhere beyond my seeing, metal rings and clatters, and voices bellow and growl.

I sing one last deep long throat-note. The lock smokes and its surface seems to boil, seething without heat. It gives one last high trill, and shatters in two from the cage-door. Atadi and I scramble out into the dirt.

I strain to lift myself. I see Atadi, rushing past the cart. Beyond her, three figures, almost dancing. One steps in on the wake of a huge arcing blade. One circles with a wicked axe ready in each hand, but turns toward Atadi and the cry of the broken cage, wearing a mask of mingled horror and glee. One raises his shield to turn aside the sword-strike, and steps inward past the blow. The toll of iron on iron reaches me. Another quick motion follows the shield and the step: a shorter taper of a sword. I catch sight of a familiar helmeted face behind the shield.

“Talhril!” Atadi howls, lurching backward away from a hooking hatchet-blow. “Talhril, you bastard!”

I clamber up, lungs on fire. I want to run but can’t make myself flee. I start, careening towards the unfolding fight, too fast to make sense of what I’m seeing.

Atadi twists from another attack, catches the following strike by the wrist, brings up a knee. The Breton moans bullish and folds over. A crack sounds out. She has his hatchet. Another crack. He slumps to the ground in convulsions.

Talhril and the Orsimer limp round each other, groaning with each breath and radiating pain. Talhril carries his shield couched close to his body, to cover a wound in his side. The Orsimer swings his sword one-handed, in sweeping warning swipes, fending off Atadi now as well as Talhril.

I scud to my knees by the Breton’s side. His convulsions have stopped and he lies face down in the dirt, darkness seeping from a broken white-glinting patch in his long hair. I heave to turn him over, following a grasping yearning instinct. My fingers scrabble round his neck, knowing where to search. I grasp home on bone, wood, hair, and flint.

I almost sob the name. “Josket!” I brandish the sound and the fetish like a talisman, crouched and hugging it to my chest. “Josket!”

A howling cawing roaring rasp fills the air, like the forest raising its voice after being too silent too long. I close my eyes and feel smoke and shadow coil around me, like the embrace of a dozen arms. The sound of too many feathers, and the gaze of too many eyes, and the deafening hush of the wind. Then tearing flesh and spilt blood, reeking out to all my senses but sight.

I taste the attack. Harsh like the tang of metal. But on my face I feel the wind, and above me the open sky.


	30. Chapter 30

“…You came back!” Atadi says in savage wrenching sobs, through gritted teeth. “You bastard’s utter bastard, Tal, you came back. Sands take you, we would’ve—…We – would – have – been – fine! Without you! Without! You! D’you fucking hear me, Tal?”

She’s tackled him to the ground. He’s straddled, pinned by her legs and the weight of his armour. Whorls and eddies of dust rise round them from the heave of his fall. The dirt on Atadi’s face is streaked clean with tear-tracks — like clansmer marks, I think; like she’s marked as One Who Mourns. And this is her mourning.

“You sold us out!” She seizes his shield by the rim and rips it from his arm. She dashes its dish across the crown of his helmet with a deep metallic chkk; throws the shield aside to set more dust sailing; yanks off the helm by one cheek-guard, snapping open the catch on its chin-strap. “You threw us to the fucking wolves and came back for us! Why?”

Atadi’s eyes and voice are red and raw. She flurries blows into his bird-breasted cuirass between words. First she strikes with fists, then with open palms, then with slaps that crack white sound outward, travelling up his body to rain down on his face. With each hit, it’s her flesh and not his metal I hear.

“Atadi…” I force myself to draw closer in a scuff-scuff of boots. “You’re hurting yourself,” I say, and reach out with a small slight-shaking hand to touch one of her heaving shoulders.

“I’m hurting myself!” She howls, mocking, and lashes out, throwing off my hand. “I’ve been hurt enough!”

I recoil, retreating beyond her reach, arms hugged tight round me. The ghost-trap is pressed to my chest again, and I feel it thrumming, like touching the sound of a warning growl.

Talhril struggles to rise up on his elbows. Atadi brings her forehead down with a groan, into his nose. Another hollow crack sounds out, and Talhril hisses wetly through his teeth.

His face is drenched wet, with sweat and blood, and twisted now with pain. I see the wound he got in the fight before. He and Atadi are sprawled still in the midst of its aftermath. The outstretched shape of the Breton, with his out-opened skull. A ways ahead, the Nord, curled up in vain against the hooves that crushed him. And nearest by, the Orsimer, whose torn flesh I can’t look at, not because it’s too awful to see, but because I made the wounds, ripped the skin, taste the blood even now.

The wound’s dark red glister seeps from the edge of Talhril’s breastplate, through the slashed open leather of his coat.

“Atadi, please,” I plead empty-voiced, “he’s hurt too. It might be bad…”

“Shut it!” Her face is slick with blood now too, though it’s hard to tell whose, and her eyes are wide and bleak-white. She presses her palms to their sockets, and against her brow. The skin on her knuckles is broken open and ragged. “Both of you just shut up…” She starts to weep. The rhythm sends small tremors through her spine.

“I couldn’t…” Talhril manages, thickly, in a voice like broken pottery. “Couldn’t go through with it. Had to come back. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for everything, I’m so—…”

His voice grinds away into nothing — just the broken-plate broken-clay riverstone sounds of his difficult breathing. I can hear drink in the noise; smell drink in his breath.

Atadi slumps off him and climbs into standing. Her tears have stopped, and she paws at her face with bloody hands. On shuffling feet, she trudges round the wreckage, and finds comfort in what she does by instinct and long practise. She stops by the three corpses and rifles through their pockets; snaps and snatches up the metal heads from arrows; unbuckles sheathed daggers and straps them to herself; takes the Breton’s wide belt and fastens it tight round her own waist, hanging his hatchets from the loops set for them. She shoves what she can’t carry into the nervy mule’s saddle-bags and unhitches it from the cart, taking hold of its reins.

“Everything…” she sighs, calming the mule, stroking its neck and flanks with her damaged hands. “Years of work. Gone. Like a dream.”

I sink to my knees next to Talhril. My throat is thick and my cheeks are hot and stinging. I dare to look up at Atadi, fixing her with my one clear eye. She’s right — she stands in rags now; sword, armour, all the things she made for herself, lost now, and only stolen things and a stolen half-starved mule remain.

As I watch she starts to walk, flat-footing slow and dejected with the mule by her side, down the road and into the haze of the afternoon sun.

I’m crying. Silent tears first, that blur Atadi till I can’t see anymore to know if she’s looking back. And I try to call out, but like in a nightmare, it comes out as a whimper — almost nothing. The trembling wracking sobs come fast after.

I want to follow. To stay with Atadi, who kept me safe, and was by my side. I think of her mouth and dancing eyes, and my lips twist and my teeth grind, and I hear a grating animal moan, and realise it’s mine. Atadi who struck me in hunger, and lashed out in anger, and receded into herself when pressed, but who must have cared for me, must have—…

“No.” I whimper, without knowing what I’m denying. “No no no no no…”

I sink my head onto the hot metal of Talhril’s cuirass, and hear the page-turning rasp of his lungs. I feel rough fingers, gentle in my tangled hair, combing and un-knotting the knots.

“Little dove,” he says in Dunmeris. “Poor little thing…”

 

_Like trawling a net across the ocean-floor, to catch up what might be caught. A weighted net, to sink down what would rather float, and bring up to drown in air what would rather live by drinking. Through and through, through salt and shadows, like trawling._

_I draw the comb through my hair. Stinging pains jolt up in the motion. My scalp glimmers with feeling though, at the bone comb’s grazing teeth._

_It was a gift. Yennai was my one good knife – my one friend – but left to be Harrowed. Now I have one good comb instead. It’s a gift but not an apology. They never say sorry, they only leave me behind, combing my hair, counting their names in time to the strokes._

_“Jemikh, my mother…Noor, sister and teacher…Senvalis, who called me nemer…Yennai, my one good knife…”_

_The comb catches. I hiss with the pain of it._

 

I lost the comb. All the same I let down my hair, survey its thatches and thickets, and filter my fingers through it, trying not to yelp or whine. It curtains a little way past my shoulders: a year’s growth almost, since my Harrowing began, when it was a little way past my jaw. I’ve not been able to get it straight, smooth, or even ever since.

Everything in my sling-sack, and everything in my pouches, I lost. My use-knife, and my angler’s pouch; my wax-lined alchemist’s pocket of simples, and my burrish fur-lined sleeping-skin. And Yennai’s comb, which served me better than my skill with it deserved. Everything but the ragged-turned clothes I wear, and these new-old boots, and the ghost-trap I fashioned to keep, like a sealed jar of savagery, to sic on those who’d be savage with me.

Atadi is not the only one.

It’s an old almost-ritual from being more of a child than I still am by traditional reckoning, but I give into it now, and whisper the names as I pull painful at my hair with my clumsy hands.

“Jemikh, my mother, who wouldn’t be saved. Noor, half-sister, teller half of truths and lies. Senvalis, who was too full of nothing to feel anything for a nothing. Yennai, who left me for a year that’s lasted two years, and who left me still counting the days. Atadi…”

By the time I get to Atadi, and falter, the names have become a chant, bitter as jowani-root. I trail off as I see shifting from the corner of my good eye.

Talhril is waking up, coming to life at night as he’s gotten used to doing, like a badger or an owl. We staggered off the road and into the woods, each somehow supporting the other’s weight. He slept in his armour, going out quick as a candle, while I made a fire. The kindling was slow and arduous. Given how much magic came storming out of me in breaking the lock and calling up Josket, I was left with little strength remaining. After, I had only the gradual in-song of the sun through the trees, and the moon and stars, to feed my powers to fullness once more.

Now the piled up fire of resin-smelling fallen cedar mutters and blossoms between us. And Talhril stirs, rubs his eyes, and speaks in Dunmeris.

“Why d’you stay? I’m the bastard – the nix-bitch’s runt-pup – remember? You could’ve gone with her…”

“But I didn’t,” I say, blunt and petulant, not wanting to admit that I don’t think Atadi would’ve let me follow. “Why'd you leave your new life and come save us? You must’ve hardly been finished selling us when you started tracking those—…them.” I gesture back to where I think the road is. “You could’ve just carried on. Leeching off Riften’s underbelly.”

“But I couldn’t,” Talhril grins through his scabbed lips. It seems to hurt him, smiling against his bruises, because he stops soon after he began. “Not for a scrap of that city or a king’s share of its gutter. Not for coin, safe passage, a way off the heads-list of that karl we crossed. I couldn’t do it.”

“Why?” None of my words are as biting as I want to make them. I’ve always come off more curious, less certain than anything else — like every word I say is a line cast out, fishing for how I’m meant to feel. “You did a fine job of trying.”

Talhril coughs out a scrap of laughter. “And that’s the filthy fucking beauty of it, isn’t it? I’m a riddle, and not even I have a rag-picker’s chance at unravelling it.”

He chokes, and coughs in earnest now, jerking up dark new blood onto his lower lip. I chance a look up, more direct now. Maybe it’s the light – or else that I’m only now trying to see him through his seeming, and beyond what Atadi did to his face – but I take him in, and see things I hadn’t. The cattish cast and shine of his whelk-dye purplish eyes. The fine high bones and youthful fruitful lips. His nose might have been a fair and well-formed one before it was broken for the first time. He might have been pretty once.

“But really,” Talhril says, sitting up, and groaning like something grinds in the motion. “You know shit-all about me, Tam…I may not be much on gravity, and piss-poor in piety. But duty? I know a thing or two about duty, and Atadi should’ve known it…”

“Duty, gravity, piety…” I say, piecing the words together into something familiar: something Noor said to me once, like the three were foul as spitting. The name on the tip of my tongue carries some of that taste, like a shudder I learnt long ago. “You’re Redoran.”

“And you’re not a total savage,” Talhril grins another face-splitting grin. “So, little savage, why'd you stay with the knight, rather than chase the lady?”

“You were hurt,” I nod to the darkened corner of his arming-coat, where the leather is torn through. “Are hurt. Since before Atadi. The Orsimer — his sword..? It might be bad. I…decided to stay.”

“Duty?” Talhril snorts.

“Sympathy,” I say. “Empathy. Keep your Redoran virtues. My path has its own.” I move over to crouch by him. “Let me see.”

He looks unsure for a few breaths. Sighing, Talhril leans on one elbow and unfastens his coat with practised motions. The travel-stiff undershirt beneath is caked to his skin, and I have to ease a hand under the fabric to separate it as he hisses out in pain.

Beneath, his skin is mottled with old and young bruises, and star-shot with scars: cuts that cover his stony-grey skin; punctures that interrupt the hard mobile scape of his muscles. The newest and only open wound is small at first. A short slim lesion stands out over the rungs of his ribs, but a broad cloud of bruise spans out from it. I touch to feel the deep-coloured flesh – Talhril winces – my fingers meet give where there should be solid bone.

“Does it hurt to breathe?”

He nods, grimacing.

“It will. But breathe as close to normal as you can. Cough when you need, or your lungs will take sick too.”

“First time I’ve had a stripling like you tell me how to deal with a broken rib…How old are you anyway?”

“It’s only one rib,” I deflect the question. “Seeing that sword, you were lucky to get away with so little. With rest and good fortune, it’ll heal mostly right in three-maybe-five weeks. I can numb the pain, make the cut safe, seal it over eventu—…No,” I growl my exasperation. “I can’t. My simples pouch…Dust and bones!”

I curse under my breath, and look to the forest-floor, embarrassed. With no fixings for alchemy, still weak from my spells on the dirt-road, and my slipshod fire-calling after, I can only call a wound by its name, not help it heal — not truly.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “I can’t do much. Not tonight. But let me—…”

I reach down into my heart-voice, lower and deeper than the changing wakening throat-voice I used before. The voice comes easier than the magic that makes a spell of it, but reluctant and fragile, it comes. I lay my palm flat over the cut and coax with my voice till the magic is supple, shaped, then taut, then released.

“Just a small charm,” I say, “but at least the pain won’t trouble your sleeping, and you’ll bleed no more till tomorrow morning, and it won’t fester unless there’s cruel magics or poison at work in it…I’ll be able to do better then…sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Talhril says gruffly. “I—…thanks, dove. You’re doing—…Thank you.”


	31. Chapter 31

In the morning I was strong enough. The night and all its lights had regathered and fed the magic in me to fullness again. I woke Talhril. He mumbled complaints against the faint daylight and my faint attempting failures at being gentle, while I made up and let go a few spells more.

One to speed the sealing of the wound. One to numb the pain, helping him breathe easy, keeping his lungs clear and as healthy at least as he’ll let them be. One more to keep off rot and festering, and the things that get into wounds to feed, burrow, and breed. Clever is the womer who adds always a third part…

“You’re a fucking din when you work magic, you know that?” Talhril groans, turning over onto his side to sleep again. “Next time, leave singing to the birds. At least for the morning…”

I kiss my teeth in exaggerated offence, as I’d known the other Velothi in the Quarter to do in dismay or disgust. It’s a thing they did among friends, family, but there’s no knowing why I ape it now.

“I’ll be gone for a bit,” I say, not sure whether he’s listening, but wanting to make sure all the same as I get up and gather myself. “Going to see about food, simples, water. That sort of thing.”

My stomach brays with yearning. My skin longs for a bath. And I’m half-mad to have a full belly again, to be clean again, and on the move once more. So I move. There’s little to collect before I can set off — only myself, my boots, my wits, and a good rhythm for walking.

I am shaky though with hunger, and try hard not to stumble on the web of roots that strike out through the forest floor. It’s a fight to keep my eyes sharp and open, looking careful from my one good side for berries, wind-fallen nuts or fruit, roots and resins I know are good to eat. But this is not my country, nor a familiar part of Skyrim for me, and most things I see are strangers.

Instead, I find water. In a place where the branches of the forest thatch so thick together they weave rooflike, and let through only enough sun to cast shadows, I stand before a small pool, sickle-shaped and shallowish.

My heart swells and tightens, dancing clumsy up through my chest. I want to slip like a seal into it, and swim till I come clean, clear-skinned and cool in this grove of shade. My hands itch to unclothe me, and I pick with nervous thumbs and forefingers at the tousled hem of my smock.

But I tame myself, and fill Talhril’s two waterskins first, before I muddy the pool. I keep to the proper ways of these things, for an Ahemmusa knows to respect water as best they can. I strip off my smock and under-shift till I’m bare to the waist. Trying not to look down and see how withered and meatless I’ve gotten, I reach two trembling fingers into the still clear waters, and anoint myself: forehead, wrists, the keel of my ribcage.

Clean enough now not to offend, I mutter a word of thanks, and writhe out of my remaining clothes – my leggings, my boots, my footwraps and nether-cloth – heaping them up by the waterside. And I yelp with shocked glee as I pierce the surface, sink into the cold blissy nothingness.

I feel the mulchy pool-bed with my bare toes, lined with the clean dark kind of decay. It’s just deep down enough for me to be in over my head if I stand on it. For a moment there’s only the coiling eelishness of my hair, floating rather than lank now. And the press of free water between my fingers and all round my swimming limbs. And the tender weight of all this, palming over my closed eyelids. And the gradual-kindling burn of my lungs as I let them stretch themselves.

I surface only when I’m all but out of breath, and come up in a fountain-burst of bubbles. The forest air tastes sweeter now for it. I scent dolorous pine, pitchy musk, the down-turned huskiness of the forest-floor. I scrub at my skin with knuckles and palms – my face, my chest, my underarms and elsewhere – before I open my eyes.

Something starts out at my sight from the poolside. A buck stares at me from a stone’s throw away, closer than ever I’ve seen one. Its legs are splayed and partway coiled, like each is deciding if it wants to stand or run. A short shovel-branched crown of antlers winds up and out from its narrow head. Beautiful or awkward-strange, I can’t decide which.

A jagged feeling finds purchase in my gut. It’s knife-edged, hard at the core, brittle and potent as flint. Flint-shaped, flint-feeling. The taste of smoke and the sting and tang of breathing it. It rings like howling. Like circling buzzards, it starts to dive.

 

_Loosed cruelty of outstretching myself. The first instant’s burning as I feel air once again. Trees, dirt, wind. Two leashes, one an anchor of force-fed love, one an in-spooling rage. Always circling, always inside, always in what is, I wait. And wait to hear my name as I hear now the sheer tidal call of it._

_Josket. It binds me. Josket. I heed the bond._

_Into myself I take what is, and make substance of it all. Smoke from the smoke that waits in pine-pitch. Swiftness from the ebbing breeze. Racket and fury from the Summer’s swarming flies. Dancing, I remember from my once-wolf days. Chasing too, and the thrill of this. I know purpose, substance, the storm of freedom that comes from being called._

_I laugh through a mouthful of blood. Then turn to stone once more. See how it is, every time, every time._

 

My stomach cramps in fits of unexpected joy. My jaw, mouth, neck, my hands and chest, all are bare still, and slick but stiffening with blood. I’m wracked, and my back shudders, heaves, as I struggle to keep down what was meant to be a gift: dark inky-rich lean meat, frenzied down my throat and into my empty guts.

I’m crouched over the buck, by its torn and fresh-stained side. The horror quakes over me. I brink on the cliff-edge of losing myself again, head emptying out into begging open emptiness. But I grit my bloody teeth against each other, and focus on the groaning struggle of my body, and the sudden pain of being something other than hungry. And I try to think.

The horror’s not in killing. Not even so messy and harshly as this. I hum to myself, trying to still and steady my nerves. I am sacred while I sing. Death and the dead hold no terror for me. The horror is not in having killed, I think. Rather, in not knowing the how of this corpse spread here in front of me. How I outran a deer. How I killed it with only my own weakness for weapons.

“Josket,” I mumble the name. Even without calling it through magic, the name glimmers through me with a fitful self-pleased shudder, like a cat unruffling its coat with a shake of its shoulders and spine. It’s the only answer I can think of: my sivami, bonded to me, to protect me from whatever would hurt me — even, perhaps, my own hunger.

Or else, was my starved-out weakness a way for Josket to change the terms of the bond and take hold of me? A sivami is a part of me – or meant to be – can that part eclipse the rest?

“No,” I mutter, brushing away the things I won’t think. “Not that.”

It’s best to act, I decide, and rise uneasy to my bare feet. I clear my mind and throat, and feel out for the wind with my senses, till I hear its voice and feel its flow. I sing to it with a moment’s glimmer of magic, and ask it to remember this place, eddying through it to mark and claim, like a flag in the nothingness of a steppe or plain. It’ll guide me back when necessary.

I leave the kill, and follow the broken path through the underbrush. I see the broken branches and pierced thickets, and compare them with the scratches and stinging patches I only now start to notice on my skin.

I retch, my stomach emptying itself into the undergrowth, before I return to the pool, and clean myself again. I dress hastily, and return to Talhril.

 

_I see Amarin’s eyes. Pink, like blood dropped into milk and stirred. He looks at me, kindly, over a bowl of stew. And I taste, and the flavour is almost familiar now. And I think, despite myself, how kind he is, taking me in, and feeding me amidst the cold and the storming sky._

_“I’ve never had venison,” I say, smiling shyly. “It’s good…”_

_He nods, urges me to help myself._

_And I split into two screaming halves. One hates him, with so much hate that it forced me to forget his face, his eyes and deeds, so it could destroy not only him but every trace he left behind. It hates him, reaching back into remembering from months of hindsight. The other just thinks: he is kind._

 

“Never mind how I caught it,” I say, sharply. “Magic, that’s all.”

“Fine, fine,” says Talhril, hands raised in surrender. His eyes, though, glimmer with something smirking, patronising. “I understand. What matters is you know how to cook it.”

I nod, and hum my agreement.

We hauled the buck between us, back to our camp. Talhril made guesses of how to butcher it while it hung, then cut it into guess-shaped portions while my stomach rebelled at the bitter-familiar scent, and renewed hunger at having been filled only to lose its prize soon after. I distracted myself, murmuring a charm-song to keep off flies.

Night fell as I cooked. The stew simmers, smelling right, looking right. We dip our bowls full of stew, and find out shreds and hunks of the slow-meat we cut from the carcass first.

“Well shit,” Talhril gasps, and whines in pleasure. “It’s good! Where d’you learn to cook a Skyrim wilds stew that wasn’t dreadful?”

“Skyrim,” I answer, curtly. “Never mind how.”

I keep my face steady though it wants to wince. Talhril’s words echo my memory all too well. The earthy brambly meat is too full of rememberings. The purple-brown sumac, myrtle, wild garlic I managed to forage — I threw them all in to cover that taste, that scent. I drink a mouthful of the cooking liquor. It’s fragrant, deep, pungent, and I’m pleased with the wild spices I found. Tentatively, I pluck up a scrap of meat, taste and chew, and swallow. And I find Talhril’s right. The bliss of hot food fills me, and I close my eyes to savour it, grinning broadly.

Haunches bake and spit, leaf-wrapped in a stone-lined pit beneath the fire. Over it, racked above the stew pot, long thin strips of meat hang and smoke, in the plains-way Noor taught me. The antlers and bones are cleaned and piled nearby. There will be little waste, and we’ll be well-fed for a long while yet, and that pleases me enough that I can almost forget Amarin.

“It’ll be enough,” I say almost to myself, smiling.

“For what?” Talhril asks, taking a single long draught from the slackening skin of wine he has. There’s confusion in his voice.

“Going North. The journey back. It’s almost time, I think.”

“Mhmm…For what?” he repeats, still puzzled.

My response is bitterly familiar too. Another familiar thing to take into myself, repurposed, spoken now so I own them. I own the memories of Amarin that escaped me, found me again in a root-cellar under Darkwater Crossing, and then haunted me — until now. I am stronger for it all, I tell myself; stronger for this past year.

“D’you know what a Harrowing is?” I ask Talhril, still smiling a little. “Because I think I’m finally finding out…”


	32. Chapter 32

The days grow shorter. Like a candle shrinks to a stub by spending its burn, Summer is ending. But still, the air’s filled with lingering heat, at least so long as the sun still shines. My skin is sheeny with new sweat, and stiffened by what came before: days of travel through hot afternoons, and only gentle winds to cool me.

I cut across country, with no map in mind and no tracks to heed. I broke from the woods into a broad down-leaning down-leading nothing. It’s not quite a wasteland, nor quite a plain — just miles of scrub, and bent trees with wisened limbs, green-flushed still from the closing season.

I wade through rivers of heather, and gather the skirts of my smock to tread through waist-high swathes of gorse, when I can find no way around.

I can guess the juncture of the year from the changing tone of these days. Last Seed perhaps, or else already Hearth Fire, I think as I walk. The same way, I can guess where I’ve come to, by the changing strange emptiness of the land.

Not quite the Rift and not yet Eastmarch, this is a place between places, claimed by no-one. Its people are diving hawks and their prey; far-ranging bees, come to sip from the moor-thickets; rabbits, hares, and sharp-faced foxes who scurry secret ways through the brush. And me, treading light as I can across it all. I don’t belong, but I know this sort of land better than I did the forests and wild arbours of the Rift.

It’s best this way. Stray too far East, I’ll start to see enclosures, hedgerows, fields and pastures, and know I’m drawing close to Shor’s Stone. For the West, shrubs and wetlands will warn me before I come near Darkwater Crossing. I pass like a shadow down the middle, between two places I can’t return to, sticking silent to the wilds as best I can.

The sky is darkening. Not yet nightfall, or even twilight, but the sun has shed most of its rage. It slips westward, in a wake of fading light. All through the day, this hazy hinter-weather makes distances hard to judge. But in the last hour or so of daylight, the haze thins to a whisper, and the horizon clears. By now, I’ve made a kind of ritual of looking while I still can.

Scouring the skyline, peering out across the dry wild grass, I look for high places. On the brink of my vision, I spy a jut of something lurching skyward. I make a rhythm of my breathing – four strides inhale, four strides out – to set a stronger pace. I stride fast as I can toward the sky-reaching shape, heading northward, alone.

 

_It’s not hard to rise before Talhril. Nor’s it hard to leave him sleeping while I gather myself and make ready. For a mer who used to hardly sleep at all except when life had kicked whatever waking he had left in him, he sleeps often now, and soundly. Yet I’m not surprised. I know how demanding it can be to simply wait and heal._

_I grab an empty sack, and a length of leather ties. And I fill the former with leaf-wrapped packages of cold baked venison from under the ashes of our fire. And I bundle up a large share of bones and antlers with the latter, knowing I’ll have more use of them than Talhril. And from the outmost bones and horn-spokes of the bundle, I hang thin-cut shreds of smoked meat, to dry in the wind as I walk._

_Yet it’s hard to leave him. It makes walking away feel more like swimming. My head throbs with the choice I’ve made, and my insides tangle and murmur about the colour of his eyes, and his rare unexpected glimmers of tenderness. But the reasons for my choice remain._

_With Frostfall will come the end of my Harrowing. Windhelm isn’t home, but it’s a destination — the place I left, and journeyed only to return to. It’s a call I’ve started feeling in recent days._

_That, and one more prickly coaxing reason. For once, I want to be the one who takes my leave. I’ll be alone again. But by choice this time — my choice._

_I look at his sleeping eyes, his sleeping face. He looks younger this way. Worth remembering._

 

The half-fallen arch dawns into sight, familiar after almost a year. I saw it first when the air was grey and tinny brittle, cold and getting colder. I was travelling Southward, fleeing Windhelm’s early Winter. Now I see it on Summer’s outmost edge. And the sight greets me, almost friendly.

I am smiling to myself by the time I get to its roots. I stand amidst the wreckage of its tumble-down half, shadowed over the spar that still groans up from its deep mooring in the scrubby earth. Looking up, it doesn’t seem so high as it did last year, when climbing it felt like daring to touch the sky. Perhaps my courage has grown big enough for it by now?

My hands were soft when first I came this way, and I skinned them on the clamber’s weather-rough rock. Now scars strike out across my palms, and my legs are strong with travel.

I shuck off my bundle of bones, and my gather-sack, and leave them at the foot of the great stone spar. Then I lower myself onto its spine, into a crawling crouch, and begin to climb. This time I know I won’t fall.

Confident if not graceful, I reach the keystone and sit a while. Perhaps I see more clearly now than I did a year before. Perhaps I’ve grown used to the odd flattish sidelong vision that comes from looking through one bright sharp eye, and one that’s dull and dim. Or is it simply that I’m looking now with hindsight, knowing through memory what I’ll see before I see it.

Eastmarch’s southmost limits yawn, open and eve-lit before me. The ground is bare except for weeds, creases, hairline cracks, standing water. I remember the salty pools and the rockside salt-licks of the place — how the water felt good on my skin but brackish and unfit for drinking. I remember the herbs I found and tasted for nastiness or virtues, back when I still half-hoped the world would offer me easy lessons, and not teach me the way it has. Reddish roots and golden flowers; spidery dry and splay-limbed weeds; rhizomes fine for eating if unearthed, marked out above-ground with a single grey-green spear of a shoot.

Somewhere beyond the ends of my sight, I know I’ll find the scant tenant-farms that skirt round Windhelm. And the ruined shell of Refugee’s Rest, hollowed out, but full of ghosts. After that, the White River will be there, flowing but waiting to freeze.

The sky is truly darkening now and the sun has already set. I shimmy down the arch’s spine, and comb through the tumble-down stones. As the stars blossom and the moons cut out niches in the night, I find a flattish place, nestled tight in the wrack of this place, and I settle down.

The night’s broken only by bird-calls. I take a scrap of bone from the bundle, and begin to add to the almost-silence. Slowly, feeling the magic spool from me like silk, I sing the bone into shape.

These past days I’ve made trinkets, and things for trade, knowing I’ve got no coin. Rings and baubles of bone; quills and arrowheads; amulets and charm-ready things; dice and tokens for lovers and children. Now I make something for myself, tempering together horn and bone, and watching them twine and weld as one, unnatural but almost beautiful. I fold into it the things I’ve learnt, telling the horn what I know of iron, teaching the bone songs metal sings as it’s smithed.

It’s not finished, and won’t be for some time. But it’s a start, and a good one: the beginning of a good knife.


	33. Chapter 33

“Blessings on you,” I say, panting.

The yurt’s door-flap shrouds to, behind me. My chest, wrists, and brow are still cool-glistening with daubs of rainwater — I feel those anointed patches keenly, even though the rest of me is soaked and dripping. I fall into the old formalities with surging relief.

“And on you and yours,” comes a voice from the shadows within: the old familiar smoke-stained husk. “What news of the world you’ve been walking?”

“I ran through the Morayat. Like I was chasing after the path that’d lead me here — like it’d get away if I wasn’t quick enough. And my chest was full of moths and my guts were full of embers – urging me on – plucking on all my nerves till I thought I’d start singing. I came across the water before that, begging a boatman for passage, seeing this – all this! – grow towards me from across the White River. I couldn’t come the way I left, there’s only a skin of ice on it, too thin to walk across but—…And before that? Before that, too much to tell. So much!

“Peace, Little Spark. Come sit. You’re drenched.”

“Oh Nan,” I gasp, something between a laugh and a sob. “Nan, it’s raining. Getting ready to storm.”

“That’s news enough for now,” says Nanrahamma, huddled in shawls and clanking with brooches, amulets, charms and bracelets. Just as I remember. Just as ever.

She sits cross-legged and upright, chewing on the stem of her long unlit pipe. My legs, that have carried me so far and for so long, are suddenly weak. I slump down by her side, by the small smolder of our day-time fire.

My bundled bones rattle, and my gather-sack thuds, each hitting the layered rugs that cover the floor. Nanrahamma looks slyly at them from the corner of her eye. I think I see her thin dry lips quirk up at the sight. But we sit in silence for a moment, letting the sound of the fire and the drum-driving rain stretch over us both. I stir and struggle out of my smock’s wet cling. I remember the proper way of things, and pull off my boots as well.

“Am I too early?” I finally ask.

“Hrm,” she chews her pipe-stem noisily, then murrs a comfortable sound from somewhere down in her throat. “I don’t think so.” Another pause — I’d forgotten how much she says with silence. “I think you arrived just when you were meant to. Tanet said she felt it, in her dreams these past few nights. Stirrings in the Line. She said she knew you were either dead, or close to home and getting closer…”

The fire mutters. Nanrahamma fills her pipe from a lined pouch at her side, and lights it with her hands cupped round a whispered spell. My brain runs warm and blank. I hurried, unwashed and worn, through bounds of growing cold to come here. And now? And now?

“Rest,” Nanrahamma says. “She’ll be here too soon enough. Then you can tell us your story.”

The tang of rendering snowberries cuts the air. It’s the last scent I remember this yurt having, before I left it behind. I find myself in the sleeping-heap of skins and soft rags that squats to one side of the yurt. Smoke surrounds me, comforting, gentle. And I almost sleep. Instead, I ask to wash myself, filling our tub – smooth familiar waterproofed hide, stretched over a sung-bone frame – up with rainwater from the trough in the lane outside.

Nanrahamma warms the water with magic. She never was one for showing affection in simple direct ways. She always loved through small gestures, and instants of forgiveness where someone else might hold a grudge.

I missed her; like I missed this roof and the sound of rain on it; like I missed Tanet. Like I missed the smoke and leather smell of being here, inside this place, enclosed but open, just so.

 

_Josket is placid. It lies in my belly, still as a stone, strong but compact. It knows what it is, from moment to moment, in ways that run deeper than my attempts to fathom it can follow. But we’re bound together, my sivami and me, and I share its contentedness. Or else Josket is calm and silent, because I am calm, and safe, and home now once more._

 

Tanet comes, moving through the greetings like a dance. Thick black hair streaked with salty grey; hard and straight-standing, hard-shouldered, strongly supple, like a tree that’s seen its share of storms but still has always held to its roots. She’s how I remember her. What’s changed, except for me?

“What news of the world you’ve been walking?” asks Nanrahamma, sly as a trap wound tight and waiting to spring.

“For a start it’s still raining,” Tanet says. “But that doesn’t mean the river’s not thick with ferrymer, shunting from shore to shore, slinging insults at the Nord barges, with cargo for and from the docks. And it doesn’t mean there’s no duties for me either. The trek up along the walls to the scattering point – with the rook’s nest, and the prayer-flags, and the tree that can’t make its mind up whether its dead or still trying to grow – I swear by the bones it’s getting harder every time. But the ashes at least fly well. Another helped to the embrace of those that came before them…”

Nanrahamma eases into Tanet’s pause and occupies it. “Tanet,” she says. “I have news of my own. Look. See what the tide’s washed our way.” She has the subtle suppression of a smile in her voice, as she gestures gnarl-handed to me, sprawled still in the steaming tub.

“Blight…” Tanet breathes, freezing partway through unwrapping her feet. “I knew it. I saw you, felt you, in a dream…Tammunei. Oh, Tam, welcome home!”

She rushes over to the tub and unfolds her arms. For a moment she jars at herself, not knowing what to hold, what to touch, what to say. I look up at her, and her dark red eyes are glistening in her hard stern face. She thrusts her fingers into my hair and holds me fast to her front, stroking, twining my hair, as if to tie me to her, or moor me in place with the knots she’s raising.

“I knew you were coming,” she whispers, close to the crown of my head. “Now or never.”

As the water cools round me, and as I re-dress, I tell them all the turnings of the past year: the story of my Harrowing.

How I travelled along the river and to Refugee’s Rest. How my eye was set askew by one man’s violence, and how the spirits of the place and the ghosts of our people swallowed him for it. So I learnt how the kindness of our ghosts and gods turn outwards into cruelty when spurred.

How I learnt to mistrust kindness at Amarin’s hands. How he turned it to captivity, hauled across the salt-marshes of southern Eastmarch, towards a homecoming that would’ve meant slavery. How magic failed to free me, but alchemy succeeded in its place. And how my freedom and my terror and my horror at it all set me wandering, to Darkwater Crossing.

How I saved a life there with the Sharing, but was beaten and imprisoned as thanks. For the sharing always has a cost: this time, the life of a child-that-might-be in return for the mother-that-was. And how the father’s bitter understanding sent me into the freedom of exile, alone again.

How I passed through Vernimwood, then into the forests beyond, where I entombed and cocooned myself with magic, to last out the Winter in slow-breathing sleep under a thunderstruck tree.

How I woke with the Spring, and made solid an oath I’d made to myself, to never be hurt or held captive again, in the form of hair, flint, bone, horn: my ghost-trap. How I set free an old wounded wolf with a merciful death so that Josket could be made, and become my sivami. And how I carried on into the Rift.

I told them of my time in Shor’s Stone, through the lambing, and then to the shield-meet, when I fought, and met two friends. And I told them of the ghosts that rose from the field ploughed up by that battle, and how I set them to rest the only way I knew how, not for thanks – for I knew I’d get none – but for the sake of dignity: the things the living owe the dead, and that wisdom owes the world.

Then I told them I turned back at Riften, parting ways with my two friends with fond farewells. I told them I travelled back at my leisure, learning the land’s lessons of alchemy, hunting when I was hungry, and bettering my magic and crafts with practise. I lied without quite knowing why — perhaps to cover up a wound that’s still tender.

“That’s a worthy year,” Tanet finally says. “A fine Harrowing, Tam.” She is smiling, proud, but with something brittle in her gaze.

Outside the night has fallen, and the rain has ceased. The sounds of the Morayat drift toward me, through the thin-stretched walls of our yurt. Throat-song round fires, and the tramp-tramp of dancing. The telling of tales, too far off to hear words, only voices in the wind, like the ghosts we all know, and trust, and honour. The scent of roasting fish, toasting spices, good clean smoke. Home is where we are, I know, but this is how home should sound, smell, feel.

“You’ve made mistakes,” begins Nanrahamma, more gravely, more stable. She intones as if reciting now, and her words have a ring of ritual in them. “You’ve travelled true and false paths. Been hurt, been healed; hurt and healed others. You’ve been half a warrior, half a hunter, and more than many of your years have been, Tam. You’ve learnt things only the world could teach you, on this, your Nemalaruhn, your Trial of Not Coming Home. You’ve been a fool, and from doing so, learnt better how to be wise.”

I keep thankful silence, head a little bowed, kneeling opposite her and Tanet, on the fire’s far side.

“You’ve returned to us, almost ready to shed your childhood. But what will fill the lack it leaves? Your Harrowing’s not done, Little Spark. Not yet. It’s left marks,” she gestures with her ever-talking hands to the blunted sight and motion of my left eye. I open my palms, upface them, and with one good eye, I see the deep line of scar that crosses them. “And yet it remains to be seen how the Harrowing will Mark you.”

“The Imalkenrit,” Tanet murmurs, “the Becoming.”

There’s a tension in her neck and brow. The word has a weight, passed from her to me. Suddenly I carry it too, and it’s cold, and I feel too clean now – exposed, almost flayed – vulnerable in half-knowing what it means.

“It’ll be soon,” says Nanrahamma, secure in her dutiful stability of rite. “You will be ready.”


End file.
